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Yes, but is it possible to turn the history off?
Authored by: Bookman on Mar 21, '05 12:55:08PM

I work in a public library environment, and, what with privacy concerns, we would love to use Safari, but feel we can't because we haven't found a way to turn the browser's history completely off. If you use a utility like TinkerTool to set the Safari history to zero days, Safari still maintains a list of websites visited today in the History Menu under Earlier Today. I suspect this is because of SnapBack. Just a hunch, but I guess that SnapBack uses that Earlier Today list to provide it with the addresses it needs to function.

If there were a way to remove the Earlier Today item from the History menu, we'd be able to set up Safari for the public, acknowledging that SnapBack would probably be unusable. Any ideas how this might be done?

--Books



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Yes, but is it possible to turn the history off?
Authored by: ibroughton on Mar 21, '05 01:34:38PM

If you set it to

<key>WebKitHistoryItemLimit</key>
<string>000</string>

then it will clear both the history, and the "Visited earlier today" section when you quit safari. Maybe a step in the right direction?

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The server is up but the site is down and I don't know which direction you are trying to go



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Yes, but is it possible to turn the history off?
Authored by: TheTSArt on Mar 21, '05 10:00:53PM

What about just using the Reset Safari... command in the Safari menu? When I go to an Apple Store and check my mail, I always use that command afterwards.



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Yes, but is it possible to turn the history off?
Authored by: Caol on Mar 22, '05 12:25:55AM
Setting:
	<key>RecentHistoryMenuItemsLimit</key>
	<string>0</string>
Along with setting those keys mentioned above to zero, seems to work, but could probably use some kicking around to make sure.

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Yes, but is it possible to turn the history off?
Authored by: Caol on Mar 22, '05 12:40:37AM

Well....

I spoke too soon. It would appear that the "Earlier Today" list is kept in memory. It does seem to be reset on a quit/restart of Safari, and the actual 'History' is empty.



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Yes, but is it possible to turn the history off?
Authored by: Bookman on Mar 22, '05 03:12:30PM
I spoke too soon. It would appear that the "Earlier Today" list is kept in memory. It does seem to be reset on a quit/restart of Safari, and the actual 'History' is empty.
This has always been my experience. No matter what you use to zero out the history settings, that "Earlier Today" thing is always running, even if it gets reset upon closing the window or quitting the application. As I said, I have to believe this is so SnapBack won't be broken (even if we don't mind if it is).

--Books

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Yes, but is it possible to turn the history off?
Authored by: dougness on Mar 22, '05 10:38:24PM

Do you have people logout between sessions? If so I believe you can address the privacy issue by using a login script to refresh the entire home directory of the default user. A "clean" reference version of the home directory is previously saved and stored in a management area (like in the machine's Library directory) to do the refreshing with. This is how we run our Macs at school and I'm pretty sure no part of the browser history crosses sessions (I will check though). This also has the added benefit of restoring all settings for the default user account at the beginning of each session. Of course this approach would depend on reliably logging out between users.



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Yes, but is it possible to turn the history off?
Authored by: dougness on Mar 23, '05 09:55:26AM
I verified this morning that the approach of refreshing the default users home directory clears out any trace of browser history from the previous sessions (I guess it would be pretty weird if it didn't).

So it would preserve privacy without having to hack away at Safari (plus - history and snapback are features that you might want your patrons to be able to use).

Anyway, if you are interested in setting your machines up this way (using a login script) this site is a good resource (check out LoginWindow Manager and the Deployment area). You'd just have to do some thinking about how to make sure folks logout (set an idle time logout, have a big red logout button widget, post a sign on each machine...)

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Kiosk Mode
Authored by: dzurn on Mar 22, '05 07:00:27PM
You can use the Saft plugin to run Safari in Kiosk mode. This hint shows how to run Saft's Kiosk only for a particular user (otherwise all users get Kiosk mode).

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Madness takes its toll.
Please have exact change.

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Yes, but is it possible to turn the history off?
Authored by: KenaiTheMacFan on Jul 10, '05 09:21:16PM

Private Browsing.

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Ian



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