How To Delete URL Auto-fill In Safari – One At A Time
Posted on December 12th, 2008 in Everyday Tips, Mac OSX, Web Development | 2 Comments »
I like using Safari and I’m a web developer. Sometimes I’ll be developing a website and then decide to rename a page. The problem is Safari will cache the old pages’ URL and then auto-fill the old URL as I’m typing. Then I hit enter and shucks, I’m getting a File Not Found error. In FireFox you can just press Shift-Delete to get rid of the outdated URL. In Safari, to delete one, several, or even all of your cached urls used by the auto-fill feature, just delete the offending URLs from your history.
To do this you can go to Bookmarks –> Show All Bookmarks. Then in the upper right corner of your window you can search for the URL you want to delete. I’m frequently typing the domain of our development server so I can delete all of the development URLs they may be outdated. Once you see the URLs you want to delete, highlight them and press Delete. This is a little more cumbersome than Firefox’s Shift-Delete but at least it can be done.
Note: Both History and Bookmarks are used for the auto-fill feature. So even if you delete all of your history, the URLs from your Bookmarks will still be used for auto-fill. Of course, if you have bookmarked a page that is no longer available you probably want to delete that too.
2 Responses
Thanks for that. Exactly what I was looking for.
It would still be nice to have something similar for Firefox’s Shift-Delete, though, since I still don’t have a way of Shift-Deleting an autofill item in a form field. Very useful when testing forms.
Safari (as well as any other modern webbrowser) will try and help you fill in forms by remembering what you typed into a form in the past. So if you start typing your name into a field that is depicted as a “name” field, then the browser will offer up suggestions as you type. This is a great thing .. as long as you don’t have Safari remember any typos.
Since Firefox’s Shift-Delete feature doesn’t work for Safari I haven’t figured any comfortable way to delete my typos from the list of suggestions.