There’s nothing more frustrating than an unwanted URL that keeps popping up whenever you start typing a web address into Chrome. Maybe it’s been a site that you typed in by mistake and because it’s in your history it keeps coming up, always getting in the way of the result you want.
(Or maybe you’ve been visiting a site you don’t want anyone else to know about, but you don’t want to hose your entire browser history? Try using Incognito Mode next time!)
How do you get rid of unwanted single entries in the URL bar? It’s surprisingly simple. We’ve got instructions for both Windows and Mac OS X versions of Chrome.
On Windows
- Start typing the first few letters of the URL in question. The autocomplete entry should show up as usual.
- Use your arrow keys to navigate to the entry you’re looking for.
- Press SHIFT + DEL to delete the entry. Rinse and repeat for any additional items you want to remove.
On OS X
- Start typing the first few letters of the URL in question. The autocomplete entry should show up as usual.
- Use your arrow keys to navigate to the entry you’re looking for.
- Press FN + SHIFT + DEL to delete the entry. Rinse and repeat for any additional items you want to remove
A different approach – using Chrome History
This is a neat trick if you’ve got a lot of pages you want to selectively delete at once.
- Type chrome:history into the address bar.
- Search for the specific history entry.
- Click Edit items on the upper right corner – checkbox will appear in front of the history entries.
- Select the checkbox for the entries that you’d like to delete.
- Click Remove selected items.
- Click Done removing items to complete.
Gerard McGarry 