How to remove the Private Browsing and Clear History functions from Safari?

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Level 4

3,423 points

How to remove the Private Browsing and Clear History functions from Safari?

I have the same situation as another old post that got little help and dead links... we need to REMOVE Private Browsing and Clear History for classrooms. If someone can tell me how, I will cut it out with a butter knife (our tech support budget is laughable considering our college size).

Students have no expectation of privacy in a classroom when they should only be looking at things for class. This is also a problem for parents with older children where parental controls are not a practical solution... thus Apple is forcing users to buy expensive 3rd party parent spying software, which we cannot do for 200 machines. Just knowing that these options are not available will keep the smarter users from doing things that they shouldn't... but not like the kid who was watching adult videos last week (yes, while class was in session).

Message was edited by: J D Knight III, because p 0 r n is not allowed... ridiculous!

450 G4 AGP (2), 1GB, 5x HDs, 110D, too many apps., Mac OS X (10.4.2), +Ti Book in need of a screen to use as a LCD picture frame.

Posted on May 1, 2006 1:48 PM

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Answer 1

J D Knight III Author

Level 4

3,423 points

May 1, 2006 1:57 PM in response to J D Knight III

I almost forgot... Reset Safari needs to go as well as it turns on password keeping and turns off Block Pop-Ups when activated.

So who knows how to kill the menu items for classroom deployment?

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Answer 2

Yang

Level 6

9,125 points

May 1, 2006 2:08 PM in response to J D Knight III

Hi JDKnight,

If you have the developer tools installed, or more specifically, Interface Builder, you can easily remove the 'Private Browsing' and 'Reset Safari' menu-items. Create a copy of Safari and browse to '/Safari.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/'. Open MainMenu.nib in Interface Builder. In the template of the menu bar which appears, browse to and highlight each menu-item and hit backspace to delete. Save and quit. That Safari application package will now be missing the menu-items.

You can replace the original Safari package with the modified one, and maybe have the unmodified version in the 'Applications' folder of an administrator's home folder.

Unfortunately, the 'Clear History' menu item seems to be generated dynamically. I can't seem to find the reference to it in Safari's resources. However, that said, I believe there are more elegant solutions to tracking a user's browsing history. In fact, it might be advisable to look at third-party solutions - ones which write history to a separate file. For instance, even if the menu-items are missing, it is possible to simply trash the relevant .plist after each browsing session to remove all traces of its history.

Yang

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Answer 3

Tom Graves

Level 7

20,615 points

May 1, 2006 5:48 PM in response to J D Knight III

You could install Gurl Watcher which will create logs of pages visited regardless of browser used. Although it is an inexpensive shareware program, the cost could mount if you have a lot of computers. You could always contact the publisher about a site license.

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Answer 4

J D Knight III Author

Level 4

3,423 points

May 2, 2006 7:30 AM in response to Tom Graves

Thanks for the input guys I will give both a shot. GURL, if we like it would have to be had at a volume discount so we will see. Right now I can't do anything as my old Dev. Tools are gone (lost a HD) and ADC will not let me in (site problem) states that my main .mac account is an invalid email and several attempts to contact me have failed LOL! I will have to give it a stab later in the day on my progress.

JD

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Answer 5

Yang

Level 6

9,125 points

May 2, 2006 7:47 AM in response to J D Knight III

Hi JDKnight,

Developer tools is available on the Tiger DVD as well.

Yang

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Answer 6

J D Knight III Author

Level 4

3,423 points

May 31, 2006 7:14 AM in response to J D Knight III

Update: Using Yang's suggestion I used Tools to modify Safari and got it to run on a test machine as well as my admin machine. The test machine required me to repair permissions first. Upon sending the modified Safari to other systems in the lab we found that Safari would no longer allow you to close windows (by any method) and Quit is the only way to get rid of them. I had to image a working system and use it to re-image the entire lab (43 systems).

[Side bar] Now I have a new problem... seeing that I was making a new image I updated the model system and cast it out. Now Acrobat Pro will not run without entering a admin user name and password EVERY time. Running under an admin account first doesn't solve either.

Thanks for your help guys!

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