Guide to Browsing Safely


Why is this important?

If you are worried about anyone knowing your browsing activities, please take a few moments to read the information below about your safety when visiting this website.

Exit site button

On the bottom right of Hibiscus’ website there is a red button you can click on to leave the site very quickly. This will take you straight to google’s homepage and will quickly hide the page you were visiting, but you will still need to delete your history in order to fully cover your tracks.

Browsing history

All browsers save information when you use the internet, including addresses of websites you have visited, images from those sites, and information entered into search engines or webforms. This is normally known as your internet ‘history’ and can reveal the sites you have visited. If you share the computer you are using right now with other people, or are concerned someone else could access your computer, it is important that you take the time to clear the history information.

As there are different browsers, below you will find instructions on how to delete the history for each of them. If you know what browser you are using, then skip to the relevant instructions below. If you do not know the type of browser you are using, click the three dots on the toolbar at the top righthand corner of the browser screen. A drop-down menu will appear, and you will see an entry titled ‘Help’. Hover over this entry in the dropdown menu, and you will see a second dropdown which will say ‘About Internet Explorer’, ‘About Mozilla Firefox’, or something similar. The entry refers to which browser type you are using – you should then refer to the relevant instructions below.

Deleting your history

For internet explorer and Firefox hold down the Ctrl key on the keyboard, then press the H key. Then, find all entries that say lawadv.org.uk, right click bottom on the mouse, and delete.

For google chrome hold down at the same time the Ctrl and Shift keys and then press the Delete key. Select the time range you would like to delete and click on Clear Data.

For safari (Mac) select “History” from the toolbar menu on top of the screen and select “Clear History…” at the bottom. Once you do this, you will be given a choice, you can delete “the last hour”, “today”, “today and yesterday”, and “all history”. When you’ve decided, you can click the “Clear History” button and the history will be clear per your preference.

Private browsing

All leading web browsers have a “private browsing” mode that, once enabled, stores nothing about your activity on your computer in that browsing window. This won’t stop online services from seeing what you get up to, but it won’t leave any traces of your activity on your computer (no history, web cache or anything else) and so it’s always a useful first step to take.

Internet Explorer: Go to Safety – Tools – “InPrivate Browsing”.

Firefox: Click the Menu button with three horizontal lines – “New Private Window”.

Chrome: Click the Menu button with three horizontal lines and select “New Incognito Window”.

Similar options can be found in Opera and Safari.