Old iPhone iCloud tabs show up in Mac Safari

Hay all,

Unsure if this has been answered, however, a similar issue was happening with my MacBook; old iPhone iCloud tabs kept showing up even though the iPhone in question had no tabs open in Safari. Tried login out of my iCloud account on multiple devices time and time again with no results.

Just tried clearing the history and clearing the cache on all devices logged into (will mention I had not logged out at this time), closed the tabs in Safari on Macbook, shut down and rebooted the computer and started up Safari and at the time of posting this the old iCloud Tabs were not present.

The pathways to clear the history and caches are as follows:

Mac (Please note, Safari must be open before clearing and ensure Show Develop Menu is selected under Advanced tab under Preferences).

History: History > Clear History > chose all history from the drop-down then press Clear History

Cache: Develop > Empty Caches

iOS and iPadOS

History: Settings > Safari > Clear History and Website Data > press Clear History and Data

Cache: Settings > Safari > Advanced > Website Data > press Remove All Website Data

I will monitor to see if this is a permanent fix or not.

Been dealing with this for a while. Phantom tabs from Nov 2020. Waited until Safari 15 in the hopes they would address it. Still wasn't fixed. Did all the things said here. So decided to call apple.

It's an issue on their back end. We tested as such. I saw it for myself by creating a new user on my MBP and then logging into iCloud and turning on sync. Phantom tabs were there right away.

So I sent a whole bunch of diagnostic info. The phone rep said they were going to forward it to the devs. In the meantime they said they'd clear something on their end in within a few days.. And 2 days later no more phantom tabs. Been about 4 days. Fingers-crossed.

Point of the story is. I don't think there's anything we can do beside call apple and tell them to clear some cache on their side. And pray that they're aware of and will fix the issue now.

I had “phantom tabs” showing up on my new iPhone that opened on my iPad about 6 months ago. In my research on how to resolve this, I read that it could have been caused by renaming a device, and I had renamed my iPad in the past. At any rate, after trying many of the suggestions I read online to no avail, here is what ultimately worked for me:

1. Sign out of iCloud on my iPad

2. Using another device, in my case I used my Mac, open Safari’s Start Page and begin closing the “phantom tabs” appearing under my iPad’s name one-by-one by right-clicking and choosing ‘Close’.

3. Clear all website data in Safari settings on the iPad after having signed out of iCloud

4. Sign back into iCloud on the iPad

5. As a test, open a new tab and browse to any website.

Then… I waited. After a few minutes all of the old “phantom tabs” were gone and the website I opened in step 5 as a test was the only 1 appearing across my Mac and iPhone. I hope this works for someone else.

I gave up trying to fix it. I suspect logging out of iCloud may resolve it for the tabs reported from my iPhone (which are all from late-2020). However, I have a lot of credit cards, and in the past Amex has thrown up a security flag when I've tried to add them back, so I want to avoid that. I know I'll probably upgrade my iPhone next year, and this issue will be resolved. (I also had this problem with tabs from my old iPad, but I upgraded it, and they went away for that device.)

I had this problem with my iphone safari. Clearing history didn't work at all, neither did logging out of icloud completely on my phone. What somehow worked was turning off handoff on iphone settings then after a while turning it back on. It resetted the iphone icloud tabs I think. I've tried it before and it didn't work, but now it suddenly worked.

I've been working on this for a month with Apple. For me it's old iPad tabs that appear on my desktop. We've tried everything I've read here including bumping it up to the engineers who reset Safari in iCloud. Still no resolution.

This issue (somewhat) fixed itself recently.

I had 50+ old tabs from late 2020 that I could not remove. I gave up a while back trying to fix it. I recently tried closing them again, and they stayed closed!…mostly. So I have successfully closed the tabs from 2020, but there are now six recent tabs that I cannot get rid of, so…progress?

Same issue here. I’ve tried turning iCloud off for safari on all devices, clearing history. When I turn safari back on in iCloud the old tabs show up which are not open on the iPhone at all.

Thank you!! This solved my issue too.

Sadly, this fix was just temporary. All the iCloud tabs came back eventually. :(

This seems to have worked for me.

+1. Logging out of iCloud on my iPhone worked and resolved the issue or old safari history showing up on my other devices despite having cleared / deleting the search history.