How to Remove Safari Extensions on Mac

Safari for Mac allows for optional third party browser extensions to be installed, performing functions like social sharing, note taking, interface with apps like 1password, amongst others. Sometimes Safari extensions can be useful, but sometimes they are no longer needed, or they can be problematic and cause freezes or trouble with Safari or for the ability to work with a specific website, and accordingly users often need to delete extensions from the browser.

This article will show you how to easily remove Safari extensions on a Mac. It’s important to note that Safari Extensions are different from Safari Plug-ins, which are removed separately.

Removing Safari Extensions on a Mac from Safari

This works to delete any Safari extension in macOS or Mac OS X:

Open the Safari app and go to “Safari” menu and choose “Preferences”

Go to the “Extensions” tab

Click on any extension you no longer want in Safari and choose “Uninstall”

Confirm that you want to delete the selected extension from Safari to remove it

Repeat with other extensions as necessary

This is the easy way to delete a Safari extension, but you can also manually intervene from the file system to remove extensions from Safari as well.

Manually Deleting Safari Extension on Mac

Sometimes if an extension is causing havoc with Safari, the Extensions manager won’t be able to load or the uninstall method above won’t work. This is somewhat rare, but it can happen in some particular haywire scenarios with an errant or incompatible extension that refuses to remove itself. If this happens, you can manually delete an extension by going to where Safari extensions are located in Mac OS and removing them, this is done with the following:

~/Library/Safari/Extensions/

Quit Safari on the Mac

From the Finder, hit Command+Shift+G to bring up Go To Folder (also accessible from the Go menu) then enter the following path:

Choose “Go” and you’ll instantly be in the Safari Extensions folder on the Mac, delete any extensions you wish to remove from Safari

Relaunch Safari when finished

Don’t forget the tilde ~ when entering the file path to signify the users Extensions folder.

What about removing Safari Plug-ins?

As mentioned earlier, Safari Extensions are different from Safari Plug-ins. Safari Plug-ins include more functionality and tend to be feature-rich media viewers, like Adobe Acrobat reader in Safari, Adobe Flash, Silverlight, QuickTime, and similar. Without going too in-depth in this particular walkthrough, you can locate Safari plug-ins at the following file paths on a Mac:

System Level Safari plug-ins location: (available for all users)
/Library/Internet Plug-ins/

User level Safari plug-ins location: (available only for current user)
~/Library/Internet Plug-ins/

Extensions and plug-ins are often the first place to look if you are troubleshooting Safari crashes and have already updated the software and removed the cache. This is particularly true if you are experiencing Safari difficulties after updating the browser, when some plugins and extensions have not yet been updated to be compatible with the latest version. For the most part, most users don’t really need any Safari extensions or third party plug-ins, and having a simpler Safari installation often can ward off difficulties with the browser on any Mac.