Comments on: Stop Tab Auto-close in Safari browser app

By: Wile E. Coyote

Wile E. Coyote — Mon, 13 Feb 2023 19:12:42 +0000

This is an absolutely infuriating change and to me it is not considered an upgrade. Especially without any warning. I don’t even have automatic updates on and already had my settings in the manner you recommend above and that has made no difference. Yesterday I all of a sudden saw all my open tabs disappear. Even ones that were “pinned.” Speaking of pinning tabs, that seems to have been removed as well. I had a half dozen important tabs pinned and those, along with my other dozen or so open tabs all disappeared. I did not even think it had to do with a browser “update” so spent time last night re-locating all the tabs and pinned tabs only to see all of them randomly disappear just now. For me, this is the last time I will use Safari. I will likely opt for Brave but will have a look at browsers in general. Not at all happy with Apple lately for this and other reasons and I have been a Mac user since I owned a Mac Plus in the 80’s

By: Juju

Juju — Sun, 23 Oct 2022 16:01:14 +0000

I use an iPhone 12 mini and have ALL the same problems listed so far. I love the use of tab groups and I realize if you don’t want to lose it to copy to a tab group. That works well for me with subject related tab groupings. However, I always need the default tab group to stay put too. I don’t always need to save them to a group, and if I’ve had a busy day may not have yet had the time to clean out default and preserve that day’s browsing. Yesterday I had 72 tabs in the default. About 1/3 of them I actively needed to say put, but they were unrelated subjects so didn’t go to a group. I switched tab groups for some recipe, and when I went to return to default, I saw it said “72 tabs”, but when I opened the default group only one tab was there. I tapped tab groups again and it now said 1 tab. I switched to another group, and when I tapped groups icon again to go back it said “72 tabs” on the default group again. But again, trying to select default failed and only has one tab, not 72. That was yesterday. Last night I had about 6 tabs open in default and just now I went to switch to one of them and they are all gone and it’s back to just one of them available. This is so frustrating. I understand not having hundreds open at a time in default, and grouping was meant to help that. I save to organized groups whenever my open default tabs start to exceed 50. So the fact that this is happening in spite of that really annoys me. My history is tedious beyond words to sift through hundreds or thousands of links to find just the 20 that I had left open over a three day period of time, or even a week.

By: Darcy Thornburg

Darcy Thornburg — Sat, 20 Aug 2022 14:19:14 +0000

My Close Tabs feature on my iPhone 12 is, and always has been, set to “Manually,” but every now and then, I will go back to Safari to look at a tab I had just opened earlier that day (for later reading/interaction), but the tab will have been closed for *no apparent reason,* and then I have to open a new tab and find the page I had open in the history, which is super tedious when I left that original tab open for a reason. What the heck is going on with Safari?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 10 Aug 2022 23:31:01 +0000

In reply to JoshC. This happens to me too, but it happens when I switch tab groups. For ex. I have the general tab that you use when you use safari, and other tab groups for other things. When I go to one tab group back to the general, it’s all gone. I read something saying it might be so it the cookies saved on the phone? Said to go to settings>Safari>advanced>Website data>delete and it fixed it for them. Only issue is you’ll have to re-log in to any and all your accounts. If this doesn’t work I’ll just use Google chrome from now on.

By: Ryan W

Ryan W — Wed, 13 Jul 2022 14:24:00 +0000

Same here, im constantly having nothing but problems ever since I updated to iOS 15.5. I never ever once had any issues in safari until now and it’s so frustrating to say the absolute least. It’s completely ruined my generally good safari and iPhone experience. Plus I absolutely can’t stand the new side by side open tabs layout, they need to at least give you the option of having the “Rolodex” style of tabs instead of the annoying and constantly shifting “new” style… also having constant and consistent problems with clicking on a link or just going to a page and after it’s downloaded just fine and ready to use it will close itself randomly, most times after approximately fifteen seconds after being opened, so it’s not a Wi-Fi or connection problem. I sure hope Apple fixes this because I can’t seem to remedy anything myself. By the way I also have it set to MANUALLY close tabs. I’m also experiencing a bug when I leave safari, do something else such as open YouTube or anything, then come back to safari, it’ll open a tab with the complete wrong page, like it will show an old page I previously looked at or even closed but the address bar has a completely different address in it. Only fix is I then have to open a different tab, load it or refresh if, then go back to the tab that had the wrong and mismatched website address and page and then it reverts back to normal like how it should have been in the first place. Another problem I’m constantly experiencing is sometimes open tabs will just flat not work and the “X” and “refresh” buttons disappear completely and/or you just can’t press them no matter what. I’ve never had this many problems EVER! And it all started when I went to iOS15.5. I’m on a iPhone SE2020. I wish I could go back to what ios version I had before 15.5… my safari experience was flawless just a month or two ago, then went to crap as soon as I had downloaded iOS15.5 and it’s been nothing but headaches and frustration ever since…

By: Carrie

Carrie — Wed, 29 Jun 2022 21:57:22 +0000

The only way I’ve found around this incredibly annoying and unacceptable issue is to move the tabs I want to keep open into a custom tab group. Tabs kept in tab groups seem to stay open without any issue. I also have the issue mentioned above of my closed tabs not appearing in my ‘recently closed tabs’ list. And that list is in a strange order.

By: Michael Akala

Michael Akala — Sat, 25 Jun 2022 06:26:37 +0000

In reply to JoshC. Same it literally happened to me just now

By: Jana

Jana — Sun, 12 Jun 2022 16:47:34 +0000

So I’ve checked and rechecked and my Tabs setting is on manual but Safari clears all tabs on my Start Page daily.
It’s only been happening since the last iOS update and not sure how to fix it.
This is really frustrating when you’ve been doing research and have to slog back through your search history to hope you find what you’d already accomplished.

By: Juju

Juju — Sun, 08 May 2022 18:39:17 +0000

In reply to JoshC. Same here. I had it as manual and this morning all open tabs were gone unless I had them in a tab folder. Those are still there thank God! But I’m angry it automatically closed all the ones open not in a folder.

By: Kushal Azza

Kushal Azza — Sun, 01 May 2022 03:09:31 +0000

In reply to Sam Leikind. Hi Sam, looks like the iPhone has abruptly killed the Safari browser process which might lead to the closure of all the tabs (hence, it's not appearing in recently closed tabs as well). The reason for this force killing might be the overutilization of the hardware resources. Apple's iOS and any other OS try to limit the utilization of resource-hungry apps and programs to avoid the system breakdown. If the recently closed tab does not have the records for tabs, you can check the Browser History. I understand it's a tedious job, but we have no other option. As a workaround, I suggest to bookmarks the links as and when required to keep your links stored safely and avoid such mishaps.