How to have Safari automatically close old tabs

Learn how to set Safari to automatically close open tabs after a day, week, or month on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac so that your web browser is not unnecessarily burdened with old, useless tabs.

Safari with several open tabs on iPhone

Several open tabs can slow down Safari and eat up precious system resources. The issue is exacerbated if you set Safari to open all links in new tabs, leaving you with a bunch of tabs that you probably don’t even know are open.

In order to prevent that from happening, many people manually close their open tabs, but the problem is you have to remember to do that in the first place. Thankfully, Safari has the ability to automatically close all open tabs after a specific period of time, and this tutorial shows you how to do that.

On iPhone and iPad

1) Open the Settings app.

2) Choose Safari from the main list.

3) Tap Close Tabs underneath the Tabs heading.

4) Choose how you want Safari to automatically close tabs:

  • Manually: Safari won’t automatically close tabs.
  • After One Day: All open tabs will be cleared after 24 hours.
  • After One Week: All open tabs will be cleared after a week.
  • After One Month: All open tabs will be cleared after a month.
Close Safari tabs automatically on iPhone

On Mac

1) Open Safari on macOS Sonoma or later.

2) From the top menu bar, click Safari > Settings.

3) Go to the Tabs section.

4) Click the drop-down menu next to ‘Automatically close tabs‘ and choose After one day, After one week, or After one month.

Automatically close tabs in Safari on Mac

Whenever I visit my parents and use their iPad, I’m totally flabbergasted by the sheer amount of open tabs they have in Safari without them even realizing it. Try as I might, my Mom just couldn’t be bothered to grasp the concept of tabbed browsing. Me being nit-picky, I couldn’t stand the sight of dozens upon dozens of open tabs, so what I’d do is close them manually in order to make Safari more responsive and easier to navigate. With this handy setting, I’ll just set her device to auto-close all open tabs each and every day—it’s one less thing to worry about!

Useful Safari tips: