Technologies

Why You Should Clear Your iPhone Cache

Why you should clear your iPhone cache and exactly how to do it in Chrome, Safari and Firefox.

Your iPhone is a handheld powerhouse, but it’s not immune to getting a little overwhelmed. After all, how many web pages do you browse through every day? Even behemoths like the new iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max can get bogged down if you’re not keeping them optimized. One of the simplest pieces of upkeep is clearing your iPhone cache every month.

Believe me, I get it. We all have a laundry list of things to remember to do each month. Pay your rent or mortgage. Give your home a deeper clean than the weekly sweep. Talk to that person you meant to talk to last month. Those little tasks add up, which makes them easy to forget. But this is such a small task, you can do it in seconds after reading this guide.

Whether you’re browsing in Chrome, Safari or elsewhere on your iPhone, your cache builds up digital clutter over time. Clearing your cache gives your browser a new start, which can speed up your browsing whether you’re using iOS 15 or iOS 16. (And if you’re trying to get your phone to run faster, try managing your iPhone’s storage.)

Think of your browser cache like a digital storage closet. Over time, an iPhone stores website data like photos and banners in that closet so it can retrieve them when you visit a site. Most of the time, this speeds up your browsing. Before too long, though, that closet starts to get cluttered, and the contents may no longer match what you need.

Eventually, your browser’s cache becomes outdated and the data being retrieved no longer matches the data actually being used on the website. The result? Slower load speeds and wonky formatting.

That’s why clearing your cache can help: It gives sites a fresh start in your browser and frees up some space in your storage. Note that clearing your cache will sign you out of sites you’re currently logged into. Still, it’s generally worth that mild inconvenience every month or so to keep things moving quickly.

Here are step-by-step guides on how to clear your cache on your iPhone based on the browser you use.

How to clear your iPhone cache in Safari

Safari is the default browser on iPhones, and you can clear your Safari cache in a few short steps. Starting with iOS 11, following this process will affect all devices signed in to your iCloud account. As a result all your devices’ caches will be cleared, and you’ll need to sign in to everything the next time you use them. Here’s what to do.

1. Open the Settings app on your iPhone.

2. Select Safari from the list of apps.

3. Go to Advanced > Website Data.

4. Scroll down and select Remove All Website Data.

5. Choose Remove Now in the pop-up box.

Then you’re set!

Read more: Best iPhone for 2022

How to clear your iPhone cache in Chrome

Chrome is another popular browser for iPhone users. The overall process for clearing your Chrome cache requires a few more steps, and you’ll need to do things through the Chrome browser itself. Here’s how.

1. Open the Chrome app.

2. Select the three dots in the bottom right to open more options.

3. Scroll across the top and select Settings.

4. Select Privacy and Security in the next menu.

5. Then select Clear Browsing Data to open up one last menu.

6. Select the intended time range at the top of the menu (anywhere from Last Hour to All Time).

7. Make sure that Cookies, Site Data is selected, along with Cached Images and Files. Finally, hit Clear Browsing Data at the bottom of the screen.

How to clear your iPhone cache in Firefox

If you’re a Firefox devotee, don’t worry. Clearing the cache on your iPhone is pretty straightforward. Just follow these steps.

1. Click the hamburger menu in the bottom right corner to open up options.

2. Choose Settings at the bottom of the menu.

3. Select Data Management in the Privacy section.

4. You can select Website Data to clear data for individual sites, or select Clear Private Data at the bottom of the screen to clear data from all selected fields.

What happens when you clear the cache?

Clearing your cache removes the website data your phone stored locally to prevent having to download that data upon each new visit. The data in your cache builds over time and can end up slowing things down if it becomes too bulky or out of date. (My phone had about 150MB of data stored in Chrome when I checked.) Clearing that data gives sites a fresh start, which may fix some loading errors and speed up your browser. However, clearing your cache also signs you out of pages, so be prepared to sign in to everything again.

How often do I need to clear my cache?

Most people only need to clear their caches once every month or two. That’s generally the point when your browser will build up a cache large enough to start slowing things down. If you frequent a large number of sites, you should err on the side of clearing your cache more often.

For more, check out how to download iOS 16 today, the best new iOS 16 features and some hidden iOS 16 features. You can also take a look at how each new iPhone 14 model compares to the others.

Technologies

Yes, This Swimming RoboTurtle Is Adorable. It Also Has an Important Environmental Mission

Beatbot is best known for making pool-cleaning robots, but it was its swimming robot turtle that won our hearts at CES 2026.

Few things in life have made me feel more privileged and awestruck than the opportunity to swim with sea turtles in their natural environment. The way in which these gentle creatures navigate through their underwater world with their deliberate and careful fin strokes is utterly mesmerizing to watch.

It’s a distinctive style of movement — so much so that when I saw Beatbot’s RoboTurtle swim across a water tank on the show floor at CES 2026, I knew that this wasn’t simply just a pool cleaner robot with turtle features tacked on. This was a studied example of biomimicry in action.

The reason for this is that the company’s engineers went on a two-month expedition to study sea turtles in their natural environment, Beatbot’s Eduardo Campo told me as we watched Turtini (the team’s affectionate nickname for RoboTurtle) splash around in its pool. «We did a lot of motion capture, like the things they use in movies, because we need to develop those joints that it has,» he said.

This isn’t RoboTurtle’s first time at CES — it also appeared in 2025 as a static concept. This is the year, however, it’s found its fins, so to speak. Not only can it swim, but it can also respond to hand gestures: I throw it an OK gesture, and it dances in response. But as cute and limber as it is, RoboTurtle is a robot with an important mission.

RoboTurtle is an environmental research tool, built with input from researchers and NGOs, which can go where humans or other machines cannot for fear of disturbing complex and delicate underwater ecosystems, particularly coral reefs. It can move silently and naturally in a way that won’t scare wildlife, monitoring water quality and fish numbers with its built-in camera.

«One of the groups that we’re working with, they want to study the coral reefs in near Indonesia,» said Campo. «There was a very big incident over there with a boat that came up onto a coral reef and it disrupted the environment, [so] they want the least intrusive robot possible.»

The group wants to deploy RoboTurtle for certain periods every year to monitor the recovery of the coral and monitor the fish population, he added. Beatbot is currently training the built-in AI to give RoboTurtle monitoring and recognition skills.

At CES, I watched RoboTurtle paddle about only on the surface of the pool, but it can also dive down up to five meters. However, it needs to resurface to send data and its GPS signal back to base, much like a real turtle that needs to come to the surface to breathe. This also gives it a chance to recharge via the solar panel on its back.

Even though I was impressed with RoboTurtle’s swimming ability, Campo estimates that the Beatbot team is still a year and a half away from perfecting its technique, with the robot ready for full deployment in between three to five years.

CES 2026 is a show where tech with a real purpose feels scarce, so it sure is refreshing to see a company use its expertise to build something designed with a sustainable future in mind. It might be a while until we see RoboTurtle take to the seas, but I’m glad that I got to witness it at this stage of its journey.

Technologies

These Tiny Robots Are Smaller Than Grains of Salt and Can Think, Move and Swim

Despite their size, the robots can navigate liquids, respond to their environment and operate without external control.

Robots smaller than a grain of salt? It sounds like science fiction, but researchers have developed autonomous microrobots that can move through liquids, sense their environment and operate independently using only light as a power source.

The microrobots, developed by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan, measure roughly 200 by 300 by 50 micrometers. Yet they can detect temperature changes, follow programmed paths and function independently for months at a time.

Their work was reported this week in two scientific journals, Science Robotics and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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«We’ve made autonomous robots 10,000 times smaller,» senior author Marc Miskin, assistant professor in electrical and systems engineering at Penn Engineering, said in a statement. «That opens up an entirely new scale for programmable robots.»

Powered entirely by light, the robots don’t move using mechanical limbs. Instead, they generate tiny electrical fields that push ions (electrically charged particles) in fluid to create motion, an approach better suited to the unique physics of the microscopic world, where traditional motors don’t work.

Unlike earlier microrobots, these devices combine sensing, computing, decision-making and movement in a single, self-contained system at an extremely small scale.

Previous efforts in microrobotics have often relied on external controls, such as magnetic fields or physical tethers, to guide movement. These new microrobots, however, incorporate their own miniature solar cell-powered processors, allowing them to respond to their environment, communicate through patterned movements visible under a microscope and carry out tasks without outside direction.

Potential applications include monitoring biological processes at the cellular level, supporting medical diagnostics or helping assemble tiny devices. Because each robot can be mass-produced at very low cost, the technology opens new avenues for research and engineering at scales that were previously unreachable.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Mini Crossword Answers for Wednesday, Jan. 7

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for Jan. 7.

Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? I thought today’s was a tough one — I couldn’t solve too many of the Across clues and had to move on to the Down clues to fill in the answers. Also … look at the answer for 3-Down! Are we using Gen Z slang now as if everyone knows it? Anyway, if you want all the answers, read on. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: Tips and Tricks for Solving The New York Times Mini Crossword

Let’s get to those Mini Crossword clues and answers.