How to Quickly Close All Safari, Chrome and Google Tabs on Your iPhone

Perhaps you're handing your phone over to someone and want to keep some confidential information, well... confidential. It could be a search for birthday or holiday gifts for your kids that you don't want them to see or more sensitive or personal information displayed in a browser.

Sure, you could individually close each tab in Safari, Chrome or Google search on your iPhone, but why do that when you can easily nix them all in one fell swoop? 

Closing all tabs is a simple enough method that nevertheless isn't always intuitive, so let's walk through how to do it for each platform. 

Close all tabs in Safari

Safari perhaps wins the award for least intuitive steps to close all tabs. To do so, you'll want to have a tab open, then hold down the tab icon in the lower right corner (it looks like two overlapping squares). Then, you'll see an option to Close All Tabs. Tap that, confirm you want to close them all, and then they should disappear. 

Close all tabs in Chrome

Chrome makes it a little easier than Safari to close all tabs. If you've got a browser open, tap the Switch tabs button on the bottom (a square with the number of tabs inside). Then tap Edit on the lower left side of the screen and hit Close All Tabs.

A couple taps will allow you to quickly close all open tabs in Chrome.

James Martin/CNET

Close all tabs in Google search app

It's easy to rack up open tabs in the Google search app, since a new one appears each time you seek a search result. To close all tabs, click on the square in the lower right corner, which should show the number of tabs you have open. Then, click on the three dots in the upper right corner and select Close all open tabs. When the popup window appears, select Close all.

The Google search app has slightly different steps for closing tabs than Chrome.

James Martin/CNET

Now you can hand over your phone with the security of knowing your web activity won't become a topic of conversation.