How to Hide Your Surfing Habits on the Kindle Fire
Nov 18, 2011 04:04 PM EDT by 
One of the Kindle Fire’s most well publicized features is its cloud-accelerated Silk browser. Beyond its innovative architecture, the software offers many of the functions you’d expect to find in a modern mobile browser, tabbed browsing, pinch-to-zoom, etc. But because of the Fire’s unique user interface, a thumbnail of the most recent page you’ve visited appears as an active icon in the Fire’s carousel.
Seeing a small picture of the last page you viewed provides a convenient way to get back to it, but it’s also a privacy nightmare. What do you do if the last web site you were looking at isn’t something you want a family member who shares your tablet to see, such as content that’s too mature for your child.
There are actually a few ways to tackle this issue, the easiest and most obvious of which is to simply navigate to a different webpage before exiting Silk, because simply closing the tab doesn’t work. The problem with that is another user could easily back track to your last webpage by tapping the back button.
A more permanent solution is to delete your browsing history in Silk. To do that, open Silk and tap the options button, the second icon from the right at the bottom of the screen.
From here tap the History button, and select Clear All at the top of the screen. You should receive a prompt telling your that your browser history is now empty. Tap the home button, and your browser icon will be gone.
If you don’t want to get rid of your entire history, then just long press on the history item you want to remove and tap delete.
Follow these steps and you can rest easy knowing that no one will ever see you’ve been looking for new friends on AshleyMadison.com.
- Amazon Kindle Fire Tablet Review
- How to Sideload Apps On The Kindle Fire
- How to Disable Web Browser Acceleration in The Kindle Fire
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November 19th, 2011 at 7:15 pm
Dude, you’re hilarious in the example page you’ve used. Thanks for sharing, I was SO frustrated with the Kindle privacy issues. Now it doesn’t seem so bad.
January 11th, 2012 at 12:45 pm
I have tried this solution several times & the last 5 or so tabs keep mysteriously reappearing. It even will give me a “too many tabs open” error at times.
January 16th, 2012 at 7:24 pm
Tony,
I have had the sameproblem. I have deleted historry items and the next time (or sometime later) ilthat I open my browser the tabs restore themselves. I’m not happy and ill be even less happy if someone uses my fire and sees something I don’t want them to see. Hopefully this issue will be fixed in the next update.
March 2nd, 2012 at 4:25 pm
oops, not quite, you may need to remove the default from the Amazon Silk Browser first before hitting web.
To do that hit the notification bar, select More…, Applications, scroll down to Amazon Browser, clear the Launch by Default setting.