Mac – Where does Safari store the open tabs

high sierrasafaritabstime-machine

I'd like to know where does Safari store all the open tabs. My daughter did who-knows-what on my laptop and all tabs were closed (except hers of course…) and the "Reopen from last session" is greyed.

I know that when I update Safari, or even upgrade the OS, the open tabs are kept. I then suppose they are stored in a file somewhere on the HD. As I do have TimeMachine active, I hope that by restoring an older version of this file, I would be able to retrieve my open tabs. The problem being of course that I don't know where it stores them…

I'm on Safari 13.0.2 on macOS 10.13.6 (High Sierra – can't upgrade my early 2011 MBP, but I don't think it would have changed something)

Best Answer

OK, just found it! I closed Safari, restored the file ~/Library/Safari/LastSession.plist from my TimeMachine backup. I then restarted Safari and hit the "Restore from Last Session"

What a bliss to see my 71 tabs back to life!

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IMac – Need to force close suspicious tab/dialogue box jamming everything

That box is clearly trying to install some funny trojan on your computer. (side advice: never download Flash from anywhere that's not Adobe's website, but I'm sure you already know that if you're 'sailing the high seas'.)

Unfortunately, there's no way to avoid closing everything. The only way out of this is to force-quit Safari through Force Quit - the keystroke 'Option-Command-Escape (⌥⌘⎋)'. This would bring the Force Quit menu into focus, allowing you to close Safari and ultimately the problematic tab. The good thing about Force Quit is that it always stays on top and in focus, so the tab shouldn't be able to steal focus from the menu.

The Force Quit menu. As you can see, the current open application is highlighted automatically.

If Safari tries to reopen the closed tabs, ⌥⌘⎋ it again. The next time it starts, it shouldn't try to reopen the closed tabs.

It's probably a good idea to track down which site/tab caused this dialog to show up and either inform the webmaster or avoid visiting the site for a few weeks for your safety. Additionally, you may want to disable auto-opening of "safe" files by Safari.

ICloud – Safari: using dtrace to investigate iCloud Tab Sync

The file that contains the iCloud tabs is:

~/Library/SyncedPreferences/com.apple.Safari.plist

It's a binary file, so you can use plutil to convert a copy to JSON/XML for processing. I expected the syncing to be via bird but some light spelunking with brctl log -w and other light snooping don't reflect changes I make to the tab database. There are quite a few nice projects on github that parse this file in python, JS as well as a nice menu bar app:

https://github.com/josh-/CloudyTabs

Knowing where the data persists on disk shows that syncdefaultsd is the owning process:

sudo fsusage -w | grep com.apple.Safari

Sadly, that private framework and daemon are basically undocumented by Apple save for what you can glean from the launchd plist for the service.

Best Answer

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IMac – Need to force close suspicious tab/dialogue box jamming everything

ICloud – Safari: using dtrace to investigate iCloud Tab Sync

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