How to automatically delete (most) cookies in Safari on macOS?

Software
1

On my Windows PC I use Firefox as my main browser, with the Cookie AutoDelete extension to automatically remove cookies.

I’m not aware of a similar extension for Safari on macOS. Therefore, I have been using a separate App, Cookie 5. This App is no longer supported, but they already introduced version 6 quite some time ago.

Now that it’s time to buy the upgrade I want to know whether there are other (better) options.

  1. What do you use to automatically remove cookies? (Except those on a whitelist)

  2. With tracking protection getting better and better, is something like this still “needed”?

2

I use Cookie 6. Great app.

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Regardless of improved tracking protection, as long as sites place cookies on my computer (including Supercookies which the Cookie app [mostly] removes - it’s quite tricky to find them) I want to delete them. Also, removing cookies resets the view counts for most sites which offer limited free article views…

1 Like
3

I have replaced version 5 by the trial of version 6 to give it a go.

I notice that download permission always reset to “Ask”, even if I disable “Downloads” for Safari.

How does that work for you?

4

Oh, apparently I should uncheck “Website preferences”?

5

WARNING I don’t recommend doing what I describe below, but I wanted to achieve the very same thing and I didn’t like paying for updates to Cookie as regularly as I did. This is just to illustrate that it’s possible to find/create an alternative.

I built my own java app (I’m a java developer by trade, there are better languages for this task) and I have it trigger via Keyboard Maestro when Safari quits. I did it like this instead of using AppleScript/shell scripting because I wanted to do more than just clear the cookies (which is easily done with a script). I wanted it to purge out history and other personal information which Firefox actually does pretty nicely right out of the box and with Safari, you have to go in and modify the contents of of various DBs rather than just delete it because iCloud will otherwise just try to resync.

Problems with my solution:

  • It relies on Keyboard Maestro. It would be better if it could be directly integrated into Safari as an add-on
  • It’s written in java on a mac…enough said
  • There’s no interface. If I want to make any tweaks, I need to go in and re-familiarize myself with the data structure etc
  • Not exactly transferable to others.
  • Cookie is a great app, covering many browsers with a lot of great functionality. One should only do what I did out of general interest.

Benefits:

  • I got to figure out some of the small inner workings of Safari’s content sharing and data storage.
  • If/when it changes, I get to do more discovery which can sometimes be fun.