Normally, Safari on iPhone and iPad will display a list of favorites on the blank pages when you open a new window or tab. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t provide an easy and obvious way to disable this, but there is a way to do it. Here̵

The search for a really empty safari page

If you’ve saved favorites in Safari on your iPhone or iPad, they normally appear on a “blank” page after you create a new tab or open a new page.

With a simple trick, we’re going to delete that group of Favorites links from the blank page of your Safari, and you don’t have to delete your favorites to do this. The key is to get Safari to display the contents of an empty Favorites subfolder that we’re about to create.

Although we have used iPhone screenshots, the following instructions also work for the iPad.

Step 1: Create empty favorites folder in Safari

First, open Safari on your iPhone or iPad and tap the “Bookmarks” button, an icon that looks like an open book. On the iPhone, it is located in the toolbar at the bottom of the screen. On the iPad, you’ll find it at the top of the screen just to the left of the address bar.

From the menu that appears, select the ‘Bookmarks’ tab (which looks like the outline of an open book), then tap ‘Edit’.

Once edit mode has started, tap “New Folder” at the bottom of the menu.

In the Title text box, type the name Empty. Technically, you can name this folder whatever you want, but the name “Empty” will help you remember its purpose in the future.

Then tap the ‘Location’ drop-down menu and select ‘Favorites’. Then tap Done.

Then tap “Done” again to exit edit mode.

We are done in Safari for now. Then we go to Settings to make a small change.

Step 2: Configure Safari in Settings

Now we need to tell Safari to show the empty favorites folder we just created. When this empty folder is displayed, no favorites will appear and Safari will generate a really blank page.

To do this, open ‘Settings’ and go to ‘Safari’.

In the ‘General’ section, click ‘Favorites’.

In the list that appears, choose the “Empty” folder we created earlier.

After that, tap Back once and close Settings.

The next time you open Safari on a blank page, you won’t see any favorites at all.

Simplicity at last! If you want to keep the page blank, don’t forget to never save favorites in the “Empty” folder we created. Keep it blank, and you’ll always see this blank gray page when you open a new tab or window in Safari on iPhone or iPad.