The old web browser history. Sure, now you have Incognito or Private Browsing mode but it can still be useful to clear your history or select parts of it. Auto-complete suggestions might pull from your history or you might just be done with a topic and have no need for those pages to be remembered. Whatever the reason, clearing the history in Google Chrome is pretty straight forward, if you want to clear everything.
You can access your history in Chrome by hitting the hamburger menu button (3 horizontal lines in the top-right) and going down to History. Otherwise, the Ctrl+H keyboard shortcut also works great. The History will open in a new tab. It will list all of your browsing history, sorted by time.
If you want to clear the history by sections of time, you can hit the ‘Clear browsing data…’ button. The popup layer the shows will allow you to delete history from the beginning of time, past hour, past day, past week, or last 4 weeks. There are also several checkboxes for what content you want to clear such as browsing history, download history, cookies, and other categories.
I ran into a situation last week where I had made a typo in a URL. It went to a legitimate site but when I tried to go to the site I actually wanted to reach, auto-complete would always suggest the other site first. This was a little annoying, so I went to the history to delete the incorrect site from my history.
You can search the history and it can pull up all the pages for that domain that you visited. When you hover over a line, a checkbox will appear in front of it. You can then check each box and click the ‘Remove selected items’ button. That’s not too bad if you only have a few pages you want to remove but what if there are tons of pages in your search results that you want to remove? That’s a lot of clicking.
The answer goes back to traditional interface options. You can select a section of items by clicking the first item, holding down the Shift key, and then clicking the last item. You can even get multiple sections by repeating that process within the search results. Then, just click the ‘Remove selected items’ button. Those items will receive a strike-through and then be deleted.
It’s a very simple tip but it might not be your first thought when confronted with what could be a very tedious problem. For a walkthrough, I created this short YouTube video: