Use an unofficial 'private browsing' mode on the iPhone

Sep 17, '08 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: ezpkns

While there are many reasons to want to conceal only a part of one's browsing history, there's no official way to browse privately, or selectively delete, history entries on the iPhone. However, I recently discovered, through equal parts curiosity and accident, a way to achieve a similar result.

Browse to a site you'd like to keep out of your browser history, conduct your business, and then when you're done, navigate to a less-sensitive site. Then hold the Home button down until Safari "force quits" back to the iPhone's home screen. When you reopen Safari, you'll see the last page you had open, but when you check history, you'll find nothing from the last session except that page.

YouTube App works similarly, but you don't need to navigate to a new page. Once you force quit, that entire session apparently vanishes into the ether. This is more useful, for me at least. Most of us don't have prying spouses furiously scouring our phone's browser history, but anyone with kids has had to share YouTube with them. There may not be any porn on YouTube, but with my sick and childish sense of humor, there's plenty I'd like to shield my seven year old's eyes from seeing. Now I don't have to periodically clear my history.

I can't say for sure whether the Safari trick prevents cookies being stored; I guess I'll find out next time I shop for airline tickets. As this is sort of a bug, or at least not necessarily intended behavior, it may vanish with a future update. Hopefully it's a lower priority than copy/paste!

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