Cleaning Up After Safari 4

      by Wyatt Walter

There’s been a few reports in the blogosphere of an issue with the Safari 4 beta not cleaning up after itself on OS X Leopard. Apparently this version of Safari leaves some data in the ~/Library/Caches/Metadata/Safari directory when clearing history as well as preview images of websites in /private/var/folders//com.apple.Safari/Webpage Previews directory as well. This indeed is a bug in Safari 4 on Leopard and can fill up some hard drive space if left unattended. The Webpage Previews directory can get quite large (500MB on my system, but lots of people have reported numbers in excess of 2GB) and can fill up a partition a little more than necessary and has also raised some privacy concerns. You can get around this bug, however by doing the following:

In the menu bar, go to Safari -> Reset Safari and select the webpage previews option. On my system this dumped the entirety of my webpages preview directory (as expected).
reset-safari-webpage-previews

You can find out exactly which directory Safari is showing these previews in via the following command: ‘getconf DARWIN_USER_CACHE_DIR’

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : May 27th, 2009

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