How To Clear The Address Bar In Firefox

Mozilla Firefox

Firefox has this feature of remembering and suggesting manually typed in URL's in its address bar, although Mozilla call it the "Awesome bar".

Firefox auto complete

If you want to delete an individual entry from the History, simply start to type it in and make sure you highlight it in the drop down using the mouse or arrow keys. Alternatively you can click on the history drop down icon on the address bar. The addresses in the history with a star beside them are bookmarks. Now just highlight the entry you want deleted and press the Del key. Make sure you're not on the page at the time or it will come straight back again.

This does however depend on one of the settings within Firefox being set correctly, although the default is the correct setting if you haven't changed it. Click the Firefox button -> Options -> Options and make sure you're on the Privacy tab. Look at the Location Bar settings down the bottom, and to be able to delete the typed history, this needs to be the default of "History and Bookmarks" or "History".

Firefox privacy settings

Setting it to "Bookmarks" alone will hide the typed URL from appearing in the history drop down, but it will still show up as an auto complete as you type. You can't delete it this way with the Del key. Obviously setting the option "Nothing" will stop all auto complete and history from appearing in the address bar.

Google Chrome

Chrome seems to be a little inconsistent in deleting individual entries from the address bar but it's still entirely possible.

delete chrome individual history

Type in nearly all the website name you want to remove until it shows in the address bar, and then using the arrow keys highlight each entry and press Shift+Del to delete it. Do this for all the entries that show up in the bar. If any won't delete, don't worry as when you have tried to delete all URL's restart Chrome and they should now be gone when you type the website name back in.

If it still won't disappear the history for the website needs to be manually removed from Chrome's history window. Press Ctrl+H or go to the Settings button -> History and type the website's name into the search box to narrow the history down. Then click or use Shift+click to tick all entries left for the website you want to remove, then press "Remove selected items".

Chrome History Remove Selected Items

Using the second method in combination with the first method if it didn't work on its own, did the trick for us.