How to Completely Disable Private Browsing in iOS on iPhone and iPad

How to Completely Disable Private Browsing in iOS on iPhone and iPad

Have you ever wished you could disable Private Browsing mode in Safari for iOS? and you can toggle in and out of it at ease at any time. But what if you dont want Private Browsing mode to be available at all? What if you want to completely remove the Private Browsing feature in iOS so that its impossible to use and not merely an option in Safari? That is what this tutorial will show you; how to completely disable Private Browsing in iOS. Lets clarify what were talking about here; this is not simply turning off private browsing on a session basis, this is intended to completely disable Private Browsing as a feature so it can not be used at all on an iPhone or iPad. For the sake of being thorough however, well cover both. First well address how to simply turn off a Private Browsing session in iOS, and then we will show you how to disable the feature entirely. If for whatever reason you want to just toggle Private Browsing off and leave it for a particular browsing session, rather than completely disable the feature, heres what you do: With Private mode off, Safari will track cookies, history, and store cache data from websites that are visited as usual normal behavior for any web browser. Remember, you can always separately and after the fact if need be. But toggling in and out of Private Browsing mode is not the purpose of this article. Were here to talk about disabling the feature entirely so that its not even possible to toggle on in the first place. If you want to make sure that Private Browsing Mode is completely inaccessible and unusable, you can completely disable the feature by enabling Safari Restrictions. Heres how this works: You will notice the Private button is just completely missing from the Tab overview of Safari. This means nobody will be able to use Private Browsing Mode at all, the feature is just disabled as part of the Restrictions for websites. Compared to the default Safari state where is optional through the button that is now missing on the iPhone or iPad: Of course a side effect of this is that an adult content filter is also enabled, so whether or not that is important to you is going to depend on the situation. For most employers, parents, educators, and similar professions, limiting adult content is probably a desired outcome anyway, so there may not be a downside to this approach that could exist in a different home setting. If youve come this far and youre confused, then perhaps youd like some background; Private Browsing mode in Safari allows you to visit websites and search the web without leaving cache, history, or cookies locally on the iPhone or iPad from those websites that were visited. Private Browsing mode is widely used for many reasons, but as the name implies its typically when a user wants a particular web browsing session to be private. Note that private is not the same as anonymous, as private browsing is not anonymous whatsoever, it just doesnt store cookies or web data on the device, whereas a truly anonymous browsing session would leave no trace on the end-user machine as well as obscure the origin of the web browsing session, something that typically requires either a respected privacy-centric VPN setup or something which anonymizes and obfuscates web traffic. Do you have any other tips, thoughts, or tricks about disabling Private Browsing or similar features in iOS? Share them in the comments below!