Erase your browser tracks
There are several ways to erase a record of the sites you’ve visited and searches you’ve made, but the most effective settings are buried deep within browsers. Wayne Williams reveals how to find them and which ones you need to change
Almost everywhere you go on the web and everything you search for gets logged and remembered in your browser. This history can be handy because it lets you revisit sites and searches, but sometimes you don’t want your online activity being recorded. If you’re looking for a birthday present for your partner while using a shared computer, for example, you don’t want the fruits of your searches appearing when they next log on. In this feature we’ll explain the best and newest ways to erase your browser tracks.
PCS and laptops
Every browser provides ways to clear your history, but how you access this setting varies. We’ll show you how to find it in all the major browsers, but there is a quicker way – press Ctrl+shift+delete – which works in any browser, and will take you directly to the relevant settings for managing your browser history.
Clear your Chrome and Edge history
Click the three dots at the top right of Chrome, then Settings at the bottom. Next, on the left, click ‘Privacy and security’, followed by ‘Clear browsing data’ on the right. In the box that appears you’ll see a dropdown menu that lets you specify when you want to remove the data from – ‘Last hour’, Last 24 Hours, ‘Last 7 days’, ‘Last 4 weeks’, or ‘All time’ (see screenshot below).
Once you’ve chosen what you want to remove, tick the ‘Browsing history’ box, then click the blue ‘Clear data’ button at the bottom. You’ll notice at the top that this is in the ‘Basic’ tab. Clicking the ‘Advanced’ tab shows you how many ‘items’ (ie, website URLS) you can delete, and also lets you wipe your download history, so nobody will see what you’ve downloaded from the web.
Deleting your entire history wipes the your personal slate clean, but if you feel this is too drastic you can choose to erase specific URLS while leaving others in place. Press Ctrl+h to bring up your history, then find the URL you want to remove, click the three dots at the far right, and select ‘Remove from history’.
Clearing your history in Edge requires a similar method. Click the three horizontal dots at the top right, then History. Next, click the three dots at the top of the History box (to the right of the magnifying-glass icon), followed by ‘Clear browsing data’. This gives you similar options to Chrome, but there are no advanced settings. However, you can use the Ctrl+h keyboard shortcut to view and remove individual URLS.
Clear your Firefox history
Click the top-right menu button (three horizontal lines), followed by History. Click ‘Clear Recent History’ in the sidebar that opens. A dropdown menu at the top lets you choose the time range to clear – last hour, last two hours, last four hours, today, or everything. Once selected, click OK to remove all items for that time period.
Another quick way to clear your history is to right-click the search box at the top of the browser and select ‘Clear search history’. First, though, you’ll need to add this search box, so click the menu again, followed by Settings, then click Search on the left and select ‘Add search bar in toolbar’.
To avoid all this box ticking, you can command Firefox to automatically wipe your history from a browsing session every time you close it. Click the menu button again, then Settings, and ‘Privacy & Security’ on the left. Scroll down to History. Click the ‘Firefox will: Remember History’ dropdown menu and change this
to ‘Use custom settings for history’ ( 1 in our screenshot above). You’ll now see the option to ‘Clear history when Firefox closes’. Tick this 2 , ignoring for now the other two ticked boxes above it, and the Settings button will appear 3 . Click it and you can choose what Firefox should wipe. Click OK when you’ve finished.
This setting deletes your history when you close the browser, but there’s a more effective option. Go back to the ‘Firefox will:’ dropdown menu and untick the ‘Remember browsing and download history’ and ‘Remember search and form history’ boxes. From this point on, Firefox will stop recording the sites you visit, even as you browse.
To explain this, let’s say you’ve visited
30 sites during a three-hour browsing session. None of these will be recorded during the session, so you won’t see them listed when you press Ctrl+h. However, you will be able to revisit sites you’ve visited – retracing your footsteps, if you like – within a tab by pressing the back arrow at the top left of Firefox.
Phones and tablets Clear your Chrome and Google app history
You have the same time-range options in Chrome on Android as you do on your computer – and the instructions are more or less the same. If you sync Chrome data across other devices, clearing it on your Android phone or tablet will remove it from those other devices, and also from your Google accounts.
If that seems like the equivalent of using a machete to slash your history, Google’s new 15-minute tool is more like a scalpel. To use it, you have to be searching through the Google app on an iphone or ipad (Android users will have to wait). Once in the app, tap your account button at the top right, followed by ‘Delete last 15 mins’ (see screenshot above). If you don’t see it, try updating the Google app to the latest version.
In addition, you can wipe individual (or all) sites from Chrome on an iphone or ipad. Open Chrome, tap the three dots at the bottom right, followed by History, then Clear Browsing Data at the bottom (this deletes everything). For more precise controls, tap the blue Edit link next to this and choose the URLS you want to remove.
Clear your Safari history
To wipe history in Safari, the default browser on your iphone or ipad, you have to go into the device’s operating system (IOS or ipados). Open Settings on your device, then scroll down to Safari and tap its entry. Next, find and tap ‘Clear History and Website Data’. In the box that pops up, tap ‘Clear History and Data’. Everything you’ve stored will now be wiped.