Summary: Internet Explorer tries to be helpful by showing you recently visited URLs so you don't have to retype them. But what if you don't want them to show?
|
How do I delete items from Internet Explorer's auto-complete list? |
Microsoft's Internet Explorer tries to be very helpful as you browse the web by keeping track of where you've been. You can hit the Back button to revisit pages you've viewed in the current session, or you can use the history window to go back to pages from days or even weeks ago. And when you start typing a URL into the address bar, it shows you a list of places you've been that match what you've typed so far.
If you've done a lot of browsing that last one can be a huge list. Perhaps even too huge to actually be helpful.
•
When you type a URL into the address box IE's suggestions come from several locations: your History, your Favorites, recently typed entries, or the contents of a folder if you are specifying a path on your local machine. Let's look at each of these.
History: as you surf the web the list of places you've visited is kept as your history. You can control how much history is kept by adjusting the setting found in Tools, Internet Options, General tab, History box, Days to keep pages in history setting. By making this a smaller number, perhaps a week or even just a few days, you'll make a significant reduction in the number of URLs that IE will show for auto-complete. You can also completely clear history here if you like. Alternately, if you would rather truly edit the history press this History toolbar button which will open the History window, and you can right click on any entry and select delete.
Favorites: This is normally a smaller part of the auto-complete problem but much more easily under your control. You can delete items from your Favorites menu simply by dropping it down, right clicking on what you want to get rid of, and selecting delete.
Recently Typed Entries: There's not really much to be done he Knowledgebase article I'll refer to in a minute. In reality it's small enough that there's just not much reason to try to edit or control this. It'll just fill up again with the next places you visit.
The File System: In your address bar you can start typing the location of a file. Type "C:\" and IE will present the contents of the root of your C: drive as auto-complete possibilities. The more you type, the more refined the list. If you type a directory name as soon as you type "\" then the auto-complete drop down becomes re-populated with the contents of that directory. This one's just a feature, and I know of no way to control it.
All of the above are discussed, along with some of the options to further control some of the behavior of IE's auto-complete features, including web form auto-completion, in a Microsoft Knowledgebase article here.
Related Links:
How do I delete history items from my Google tool bar? Deleting Google history takes a few steps, depending on what Google history you mean. Here are step-by-step instructions for deleting Google history.
Article C1890 - February 5, 2004
I have done the http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/iehv.html website and downloaded the utility for free and it worked. It took like 2 minutes. All you have to do is download the utility, unzip it to a folder, click on the exe file, check the boxes that you want to delete and then delete them with the X at the top. It works very well.
Posted by: Reggie at April 17, 2008 10:48 AMHow do i delete item from my Favorites List that I no longer want on the list?
Posted by: Jimmy Dean Plummer at June 15, 2008 1:43 PM-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Right click on the item in the list and then click on Delete
in the menu that pops up.
Leo
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (MingW32)
iD8DBQFIVaihCMEe9B/8oqERAscyAJ4wzuduYbZ1xV6hXoA5XZ1A7Km54gCeIcmZ
Posted by: Leo at June 15, 2008 4:41 PMs+4CpyWdoffeoXQX8pxnaWk=
=VrQD
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
If you want to remove all of he items, then un check the "forms" part of the autocomplete settings in Tools.
If it's just one or two items, from the google seach, simply type in the first letter of the search item, so it shows. use the cursor keys to move down to the item you want to remove then press the Delete Button!
Chris
Posted by: chris at July 18, 2008 3:30 AMHi,
I had the same problem. I deleted the entry from the registry and then I did a search on my history (click the history icon on the ie and then click search) for the annoying URL (it was a misspell of a link I usually type a lot). Finally I just right clicked and delete and it stopped showing it on the addressbar when I started typing.
The autocomplete is probably done using the registry, and links infavourites & History... So you should delete it from all in which it appears...
Hope this helps!
Posted by: Luis at July 31, 2008 9:41 AMReleasing the history from the 'ctrl H' feature is really helpful. I did not realize how long the memory is kept there - I wonder if that has any bearings on the speed of the system; as all of that would take up some disk space.
Posted by: Henry Paulson at October 14, 2008 2:07 PMThanx Leo!
I had a problem recently with urls appearing and not being cleared after the normal means of clearing history etc.. i decided to remove all the homepages used for IE it went to blank. I immediately lost all the urls that were permanently on the IE browser. I am not sure if this is a permanent fix but my browser is clear of the clutter.
Posted by: shamR at March 5, 2009 10:06 AMNot a computer whiz so I need simple directions.Just did update on Windows and do not like having history and favorites in my address bar. How do I keep only visited sites like the "old days"???
Posted by: Kerry at May 9, 2009 1:19 PMWhen I right click on address bar to enter previous sites, the bar also shows my favorites and history. Before I had to click on icon that had favorites. How do I get address bar to only show www. sites previously entered...computer new with vista operating system...frustrated
Posted by: cole at June 3, 2009 9:16 PMI tried deleting my history and it doesn't work. I'll come back on and it's all still there. I've tried everything. I press the delete button next to only certain addresses and that does nothing, it just deletes it then and when i open it back up, it's there again. I also tried the tools-internet options-delete. Nothing works.
Posted by: amanda at July 26, 2009 12:44 AM