Chrome comes equipped with a repository of functions, all intent on making our lives easier; even the seemingly annoying autosuggestion of URLs in the Omnibox – the dual-purpose search and address bar – was intended to save you from typing out a full address.  For instance, if you are looking to visit TechwireHub.com, you start typing t, e, c, and chrome will automatically suggest Techwirehub.com. While it can be a real time-saver in a lot of instances, like when you are revisiting a site with a long address that you had previously overlooked to bookmark. However, it can be a real pain in the neck most of the time.

We have all visited sites we would prefer not to have appear in our list of suggestions, perhaps it’s a site you didn’t like, or visited by accident. The list of suggested URLs can reveal your search history to someone watching over your neck or someone you share a computer with. If you are concerned about your privacy, you wouldn’t want other people to see which sites you have visited.  If any of those possibilities are making you sweat, here’s how you can prevent this from happening.

How To Remove A Single URL From Chrome Autofill?

If it’s a matter of just a single URL, follow the simple step-by-step instructions below to remove the suggestion from ever appearing again:

• Fire up the Chrome app.
• Type out the URL until the entry you want to erase appears.
• Use the Down arrow key to highlight the entry.
• Press Shift + Delete.
• This will eliminate the URL from the autofill suggestions.

Delete URL Suggestions Manually

However, when you are looking to delete multiple suggestions from the same website, things get a bit complex. You can’t possibly hope to delete every one of them individually, unless you have all the time and patience in the world. Bad news: this labor-intensive task only works temporarily. In no time, Google will fill up its treasure-trove of suggestions again.

The fastest and easiest way is to wipe your browsing history to get rid of the URL suggestions permanently. Open the Settings menu, choose ‘More tools’, then ‘Clear browsing data’ to delete your entire browsing history. Alternatively, you can use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+Delete to open the same page, and check the box titled ‘Browsing history’ only. You can even specify the period within which your history should be erased and click on the ‘clear data’ button. However, this will still retain sites that are stored in your bookmarks. For that, right- click on those sites in the bookmarks menu and hit ‘delete’.

Delete URL Suggestions With A Browser Extension

If you frequently need to clear out your URL suggestions, why not download an extension that makes things a tad bit easier for you? For instance, the Click&Clean browser extension makes it far easier to delete saved URLs than navigating through the endless sea of Chrome’s settings.

Install the extension, click on the icon in your browser toolbar, navigate to ‘Clear private data’ and click the settings icon. In the Chrome section, click the trash can icon next to any data type that you wish to remove. Check the boxes pertaining to anything you would like to be able to delete from your browsing history and select the ‘Run cleaner’ button to remove them easily and in a hassle-free manner.

You can leverage the ‘Obliterate’ drop-down menu to customize the time frame for deletion as well. Once you have tailored the tool to your preference, in future, all you have to do is to click the Click&Clean button in the Chrome toolbar and select ‘Clear private data’ to get rid of everything that you have specified before; that too, in a single click.

Claire Liam

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