Phantom Tabs STILL? I've not had the issue since Creating a second profile in Safari and moving to that as my main profile. Ive been curious if I move back to the "Personal (Default)" if phantom tabs would return but currently no issue to even go through the trouble of switching back off the second profile I created.
I had the phantom tabs issue several years ago after some ios release. I kept waiting for the next release to fix it but that never happened. I finally was able to do it myself. If I’m remembering right I had to use the device that the tabs were theoretically coming from even though they had been closed ages before. Trying various things on the device that was displaying the tabs did nothing. I think at the time it was tabs on my ipad that were supposedly from my phone. I think I cleared all history and data on the phone, force quit Safari and restarted both the phone and the iPad. It was some process like that and it permanently fixed the issue for me. I may have also signed out of iCloud on the phone. It’s been so long I don’t really remember. But I do know that there’s nothing you can do on the device which is displaying the tabs. Whatever you do has to be done on the device they’re supposedly originating from. Doing it on that device will just result in iCloud repopulating those tabs. I had one instance of it here on 27 on my ipad, my phone remains on 26. I just force quit Safari and it cleared those tabs. I’ve never used profiles.
As of iOS 18, turning off iCloud sync for Safari on the device that supposedly has the tabs open, force quit Safari, reboot device, then re-enable Safari sync has consistently fixed the issue for me when it happens.
That’s what I did! I just found my report submitted to Apple in 2021. 5 years back is a little to long for me to remember specific details🤷♂️ Anyway that worked and I’ve not had the issue again till the last day or so in 27 on my ipad, but just force quitting Safari took care of that. I regularly close tabs from the other device without issue.
SO still a thing! Yeah I created a new profile, I seem to recall there is a way to bring over the existing bookmarks to new profile, then I made a text document with the url for each opened tab across all four devices and then closed all the tabs. Then swapped over to new profile on each device and pasted the urls back to new tabs and was right back to where I was at. At since then, not a single phantom tab.
