How to fix “can’t log into YouTube from Safari” on macOS

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Something rather strange happened to me today: Safari 10 on macOS Sierra refused to let me login to YouTube. All it did was constantly refresh the page in an endless loop, or just display the front page of YouTube. I cleared the caches, reset the history, but no trick seemed to solve the problem.

When I dug deeper into the Preferences, I found something under Privacy that finally fixed it. Let me share with you what worked on my system.

  • head over to Safari – Preferences
  • select the Privacy tab
  • you’ll see a window like this one:

  • select Manage Website Data
  • after a few moments you’ll see a LONG list of websites that have saved cookies on your machine over time
  • in the top right corner, search for YouTube
  • you’ll see something like this:

  • select the YouTube.com entry and hit Remove, followed by Done
  • now surf back to YouTube and login – this time it’ll work

What we’ve just removed were not just cookies, but also HTML local storage data, as well as cache data specific to the YouTube website. I guess cached stuff can get outdated, or not properly deleted when we close our browser in a hurry.

The principle should work for other websites too, should they give you trouble. If you’re sick and tired of any website saving data to your system, consider switching to the “Always Block” option seen in the first screen shot.

 



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