Help - Safari settings changing by themselves!

[nhcowboy1]

The first thing I noticed was that my home page was gone and had been replaced with the apple home page (the default page). Then I noticed that the "home" button on my toolbar was gone - and it had been there just a moment before when I clicked on it and got taken to the apple home page!

When I checked my safari preferences, I discovered that my "history" preference had been changed also - going from "delete manually" to "delete after one month." And when I checked my history, I discovered that everything prior to August 5 had indeed been deleted!

Oh yes, and a slew of new bookmarks and bookmark folders had been added to my bookmark list - all of them the default bookmarks that came with Safari that I had long since deleted!

So, what the heck is going on??? And, more importantly, is there any way to recover my browser history?

 

[hughvane]

That's an insidious thing to happen. Have you done an update to Safari or the OS very recently? A suggestion only - consider using Firefox instead.

Safari History can be found at Users/YourName/Library/Caches/Metadata Check there to see if your old history has been retained by looking at the Date Modified column (List view).

 

[John Doe 57]

You should do a clean RESET:

1. Download OnyX (a free maintenance utility).

2. Go into your homedirectory/Library/Internet Plug-Ins and remove (you can move it all to your desktop or another folder) everything.

3. Delete the "com.apple.Safari.plist" and "com.apple.Safari.RSS.plist" files in your homedirectory/Library/Preferences folder.

4. Run OnyX and clear ALL caches (System, Fonts, User, etc.). Note, in each tab, execute the command. When it finished in that tab, it will ask you to reboot. Say NO. Go on to the next tab and repeat until all tabs are done. THEN REBOOT.

 

[nhcowboy1]

You should do a clean RESET

Please explain.

My objective is not to reset Safari, but to get it back to the way it was before it partially reset itself. So I don't understand how doing a clean reset would get me closer to this goal . . .

 

[John Doe 57]

Please explain.

My objective is not to reset Safari, but to get it back to the way it was before it partially reset itself. So I don't understand how doing a clean reset would get me closer to this goal . . .

Yeah I know, but it is the safest and most efficient way to solve this problem. Yes you will lose data (cookies, history) but it will (hopefully) fix the problem.