Quickly Open New Private Browsing Tabs

Are you looking for an easy way to create a new private browsing window or tab in Safari on the iPhone? Just long press on the tab icon in the lower right corner. When you long press on it, instead of showing you all your tabs as thumbnails, Safari will show a menu that includes the option to open a new private window, or if you are in a private window, you can select to go back to a non-private window. See how to quickly switch between standard browsing windows or tabs and private tabs in this video for Safari on the iPhone.

Video TranscriptIn this video, I’m going to show you how you create a new private tab in Safari on the iPhone. If you’re using iOS 15 or later, they changed how this works, how you create a new private tab. Let’s see how this is done on the iPhone. Let’s go to my iPhone.

So I am using iOS 15 here, and with iOS 15, what Apple did is they introduced the address bar down towards the bottom. So, if you see the address bar down towards bottom, in most cases you’re using iOS 15 or later.

Now, let’s say you wanted to create a new private tab, a new private web page. We have a couple of ways to do this. The standard way is to just tap on these two squares here. It’s going to show all of my different tabs. And then when we tap on our two tabs here, we have an option Private. I tap on Private and now I’m in private browsing mode.

But there’s an easier way to do that. You do not have to tap on those two squares and then tap on tabs and then tap on Private. Let’s go and tap on Done here. I want to create a new webpage, a new tab, but I’m in private mode. I want to create a tab not in private mode, in standard mode. Now, normally what you would do is you would tap on these two squares again and then go over to Private and turn private off. Basically just go back over to my two tabs. And now I’m back in my regular mode, I am no longer in private mode.

Instead of doing all of that tapping, all you have to do is just long press on our tab icon. When I long press on this or tap and hold, you’re going to see New Private Tab. All I do is just tap on this and I’m in a new private tab. I want to go back to my regular mode. I no longer want to be in private browsing mode. I long press on this, and then I go back over to my two tabs. So instead of doing all of that tapping, tapping on the tab icon, then tapping on tabs and then tapping on Private, all you have to do is just long press or tap and hold on the tab icon. From there, what you’re able to do is enter private browsing mode. Or if you’re in private browsing mode, you can go back to your regular tabs.

So that’s how you can quickly enter private browsing mode, as well as go back to the regular mode, leave private browsing mode in Safari on the iPhone.