Taming the Tab Chaos: How to Auto-Close Safari Tabs on School iPads

If you’ve ever picked up a student iPad only to find 50+ open tabs ranging from Mathletics to Roblox wikis and three-week-old search results for “cute baby pandas,” you are not alone.(Especially if, like us, you are looking at life-cycles) I was recently greeted with a terrifying looking shoebill on one of our shared iPads. It’s an annoying, or I should say ‘inevitable‘ part of working with shared devices.

I call this phenomenon “The Tab-alanche.”

It’s that moment when a student opens Safari and is immediately buried under a mountain of digital clutter left behind by the last three kids who used the device.

Not only does it make it hard for students to find what they actually need today, but having hundreds of open tabs can sluggishly drain the iPad’s battery and performance. And let’s be honest, asking a year 1 student to “please go through and close your old tabs” is a recipe for losing 10 to 20 minutes of instructional time.

As I always say to my Student Tech Team:

“An iPad with 50 open tabs is like a whiteboard that never gets erased. The next student doesn’t use a blank canvas; they try to write on top of yesterday’s scribbles.”

The good news? Safari has a hidden setting that fixes this automatically. You can set it once, and the iPad will “clean itself” every day (or week).

Here is the quick fix to save your sanity and your bandwidth.

The Fix: Step-by-Step Guide

You (or your students, if they are a bit older) can do this right on the iPad. It takes about 30 seconds per device.

• Open the Settings app (the grey gear icon).
• Scroll down the left-hand menu until you see Safari (it has the blue compass icon). Tap it.

• On the right side, scroll down until you see the TABS section.

• Look for the option that says Close Tabs.
  • Note: It is usually set to “Manually” by default.
• Tap it and change the setting to After One Day.

Why “After One Day”? I recommend “After One Day” for shared school devices. This ensures that when a student picks up the iPad the next morning, they are starting with a clean slate. No leftover history from the previous student, no distractions, just a fresh browser ready for learning.

For the Tech Team: Background on Central Management

If you are a teacher, you can forward this section to your IT Coordinator, IT director, or Network Manager.

The Issue: Teachers are asking for iPads to automatically clear Safari tabs to prevent students from accessing previous users’ browsing sessions and to improve device performance.

The MDM Reality: You might be looking for a specific Configuration Profile payload (via Jamf, Mosyle, Meraki, etc.) to force the Safari > Close Tabs > After One Day setting across all devices.

Important Note: As of the current iPadOS frameworks, Apple does not expose the specific “Auto-Close Tabs” timer as a forceable MDM payload for standard 1:1 or shared device deployments. You cannot currently push a profile that toggles this specific user preference from “Manually” to “After One Day.”

The Solutions: Since we cannot force this specific setting remotely via MDM, here are the two architectural approaches schools generally take:

1. Shared iPad Mode (Recommended for Carts): If you configure the devices as “Shared iPad” (using Apple School Manager + MDM), you can utilize Temporary Sessions. When a student logs out (or is auto-logged out), the OS destroys the local user container. This effectively wipes all tabs, history, and cookies between sessions automatically.
2. The “Manual Touch” (for 1:1 or Cart-based without Shared iPad): If your devices are not in “Shared iPad” mode (i.e., they use a single generic “Student” login), the manual step described above is the only way to engage the auto-close timer. You may want to incorporate this step into your initial device provisioning checklist or have a “Tech Helper” student squad go through the cart once to change this setting manually.

Summary for Teachers

For now, the best bet is to grab that stack of iPads, sit down with a coffee, and toggle this setting to “After One Day.” It’s a small tweak that makes a big difference in keeping our digital classrooms focused and clutter-free!