How many tabs can you open on iPhone?

Safari for iPhone allows you to have a maximum of 500 tabs open for each tab group, but you can create as many tab groups as you like.

In the past, there were a number of tabs you could open in the Safari browser on your iPhone. Now things are a little more complicated. Here’s how Safari tabs work on iOS.

But first, some card wrangling tips

Before we delve into the historical and current tab limitations of the mobile version of Safari, there’s a good chance if you opened this article out of more than curiosity, it’s because you’re interested in managing your iOS browser’s tabs more efficiently.

In that case, check our list of tips for keeping iPhone Safari tabs under control. And while you’re at it, we’ve also got some great general tips for get more from iPhone Safari.

If you simply used Safari as your primary web browser to open links and didn’t use any of the extra features like Reader Mode and tab grouping, you’re missing out.

So how many iPhone Safari tabs can you have?

Maybe you’ve never looked at how many tabs you have open in Safari. I admit, I didn’t pay much attention to it. In fact, I’ve upgraded several iPhones over the years, bringing all my apps, settings, and data with me—including Safari data—and never really looked.

Until one day I looked and, to my surprise, saw the sheer number: 500. Turns out it wasn’t just some cosmic coincidence, but me looking down the hard cap of tabs that Safari will keep.

Historically, before the arrival of iOS 15 and Safari tab groups, you could only have 500 tabs in regular browsing mode and 500 tabs in private browsing mode, which allows you to – if you used private browsing mode creatively – max out at 1000 tabs.

With the arrival of iOS 15, not only can you make the most of the main list at 500 and the private browsing mode at 500, but you can also take advantage of the tab grouping feature and copy over an existing pile of cards into a group or start over with a new group of cards. The new pool has a limit of 500 cards.

You can make tons of new cards. How much? We haven’t been able to find any documentation on the upper limit, and frankly, after building dozens and dozens of new cards, we weren’t sure if there was any benefit to testing the upper limit. Once you have 25 card groups with the ability to hold 500 cards each, you’re looking at 12,500 cards.

On top of that, once you hit 6 groups of cards (3,000 cards), you have to scroll to see more. Once you hit 13 groups of cards (6,500 cards), they don’t all fit on the screen and you have to scroll to see more than the initial group. Now, obviously, not everyone will be able to sort through every card group to the full 500 cards, and they may like to use them that way for organizational purposes.

Our point, though, is that with the changes introduced to Safari with iOS 15, there’s no practical limit to the number of tabs you can save. You can remove as many as you can, although we seriously question the utility of having thousands of cards. Even with card grouping and the ability to search the page titles on the tabsit quickly becomes an unmanageable mess.

And if all this talk of card clutter makes you feel the need to clean up your cards, feel free. In fact, you can even configure Safari to automatically clear cards according to schedule.