Reset Safari Settings/Preferences

Hi Neville, Thanks for the wonderful command sequence to cleanup Safari. I have been looking for something like this to help reset Safari. For the last few months since upgrading to Sierra, I find the system suddenly and randomly crawl. Activity monitor shows high CPU for "kernel task". After reading and trying various things (PRAM/NVRAM reset include), I noticed if I closed Safari the system would instantly recover. I have verified this a zillion times. So clearly something has gone wrong with Safari settings. My question - if I execute the above steps, will Safari lose all cached passwords ?

The trouble is Safari has so many files all over the place.

First export bookmarks then quit Safari.

Open Terminal - in Utilities and paste the following - make sure it is the same as here - particularly first and last characters - then hit return - it will save your Safari folder with a date stamp on your Desktop and delete several files.

mv ~/Library/Safari ~/Desktop/Safari-`date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S`; \

rm -Rf ~/Library/Caches/Apple\ -\ Safari\ -\ Safari\ Extensions\ Gallery; \

rm -Rf ~/Library/Caches/Metadata/Safari; \

rm -Rf ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari; \

rm -Rf ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.WebKit.PluginProcess; \

rm -Rf ~/Library/Cookies/Cookies.binarycookies; \

rm -Rf ~/Library/Preferences/Apple\ -\ Safari\ -\ Safari\ Extensions\ Gallery; \

rm -Rf ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Safari.LSSharedFileList.plist; \

rm -Rf ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Safari.RSS.plist; \

rm -Rf ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Safari.plist; \

rm -Rf ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.WebFoundation.plist; \

rm -Rf ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.WebKit.PluginHost.plist; \

rm -Rf ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.WebKit.PluginProcess.plist; \

rm -Rf ~/Library/PubSub/Database; \

rm -Rf ~/Library/Saved\ Application\ State/com.apple.Safari.savedState

From your Safari menu bar top of your screen click Safari > Preferences then select the Privacy tab.

Click: Remove All Website Data

Quit then relaunch Safari.

If that didn't help, open the Finder. From the Finder menu bar click Go > Go to Folder

Type this exactly as you see it here:

~/Library/Cookies

Click Go

Move the Cookies.binarycookies file from the Cookies folder to the Trash.

Disable the Lion resume feature...

Open System Preferences > General

Deselect: Restore windows when quitting and re-opening apps

Quit then relaunch Safari to test.

This script has been developed to work on several OSs and I test it from time to time but I always welcome feedback.

Recently it failed to remove all my bookmarks - I must test this again.

I have slight doubts about password retention after its use and would particularly welcome any feedback on this issue.

Don't forget to reset all your Safari preferences and import your bookmarks.

Wow. That is what I call a cool clean-up step. thank you. (referring to Neville's list of commands to paste into Terminal.)

I ran into some nasty Safari malware today. It hijacked everything! Couldn't get to any settings in Safari. This script fixed it.

Neville, you're a rockstar!

Thanks so much Neville! Your script and directions worked perfectly.

Thanks Neville! - I picked up some junk from the web that was preventing Safari from saving preferences. The script fixed it perfectly.