Bookmarks, history, files, and what sites cost

Including one window most browsers will not show you

Bookmarks and history are a searchable library. Downloads are a folder with a memory. And there is a window that answers what a website is actually doing to your computer.

The Website Activity window listing each tab with memory, CPU, time on screen, and tracker counts — One news site at 554 MB, a Wikipedia article at 107 MB. Your browser knows this and usually will not say.

Things to try

about 6 minutes

01Bookmark the page, then open the library.⌘D⇧⌘BOpen, edit, organize, delete, import, and export.
02Import bookmarks from another browser: Edit menu, Import Bookmarks.
03Open history and remove a single URL.⌘YPrivate visits were never written here.
04Open the downloads window.⇧⌘JEverything you have downloaded and uploaded, grouped by day, with live file metadata and Quick Look. Today collapses to a bare time, this week to a weekday.
05Option-click an image on a page.It downloads. Settings, Downloads decides whether bare image URLs count.
06Open Show Website Activity from the File menu and leave it open for a minute.Memory, CPU, how long each tab has actually been on screen, how slowly it loaded, whether it is quietly playing something, and how many other companies it invited along. Sampling only runs while that window is open.
07In Settings, Memory, turn on memory saving and pin a site that should never be released.Displayed tabs are always exempt, including every pane of a split. Set a per-tab policy from the tab's right-click menu.

Worth filming

The Website Activity window on a news site with a dozen trackers. Nobody has seen their browser admit that before.

Settings panes behind this chapter: Downloads, Memory.