That’s where the History disable button add-on may come in handy. You could call it a lite version of private browsing mode as it only disables the Firefox history when it is active. It will block the Internet history for the time it is active. This includes both the History menu in the web browser as well as the auto-complete feature when entering text in the address bar of the Firefox browser.

The main advantage of the add-on is that you can continue using the browser with all the tabs that are currently open. The disadvantage is that traces of visited sites remain on the system. This includes among other things the cached files on the local hard drive.

Sometimes though disabling the browsing history may be enough. This can be the case when you are shopping for a birthday present for a loved one for instance, and more generally whenever you want to avoid that websites appear as auto-complete suggestions or the history of the browser.

The add-on adds a button to Firefox’s navigational toolbar. If you have disabled that toolbar, like I did, you may need to move it to another address bar. Just select View > Toolbars > Customize and drag and drop the button to another toolbar to have it accessible all the time.

A click on the button then enables or disables the history function in the browser. Firefox users can install the History disable button by visiting the Mozilla Add-on repository.

Applications like CCleaner on the other hand speed up the process significantly, especially if more than one browser is installed and used on the computer system. Another program with a very similar functionality is Browser Cleaner.

Browser Cleaner has been primarily designed to delete the Internet history of web browsers that are installed or in use on the system. The portable software program supports popular web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome and Opera.

The Options button next to each browser’s name opens a detailed configuration menu in which specific files or items can be selected for deletion. This includes the browser’s cache, history, cookies or download history.

Everything is selected by default which means that a click on Clean Now will delete the complete Internet history of all supported web browsers.

Browser Cleaner offers more than just the deletion of Internet files and traces. It supports deleting the history of Instant Messaging software programs and file sharing programs as well. Supported are more than ten programs in each category, from file sharing programs such as emule, iMesh or uTorrent to instant messaging programs like AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ, Yahoo Messenger or Google Talk.

That’s still not the end of it. The tabs Windows Items and Applications lead to additional locations and information that you can delete with the program.

Windows Items list a few dozen Windows locations, from the temporary files folder over log files to Windows Live Messenger Cache and History.

The Applications tab lists popular third party applications from companies like Adobe, Macromedia or AVG.

The selections are not as complete as in CCleaner, but they come very close. It is however missing some of the customization options of CCleaner.

Browser Cleaner can be handy for users who want to delete their computer’s Internet history with minimal effort. It takes just two clicks to do that with the application. The latest version of the program, compatible with all recent versions of the Windows operating system, is available for download at the developer website.

The file index.dat which exists many times on windows xp accounts, to be precise many times for every user, stores visited urls and cookies for instance even though you deleted that information before. Microsoft surely has a good explanation for this, right ? They say it is to speed up Internet Explorer but this sounds somewhat fishy, why would you need for instance the cookies if you have deleted them ?

To find index.dat on your computer you need to do the following (Win xo only). Open any folder, click on tools, folder options. Select view from the tab and uncheck “hide protected operating system files” and make sure “Show hidden files and folders is enabled”. Now search for index.dat and windows will come up with some search results.

It does help to view the file in an normal editor, it won’t show anything. What you need to do to see the list of urls or cookies is to download the sweet little tool Pasco created by Keith Jones. It is a freeware command line utility. Unpack it, copy any of the index.dat files into the bin dir of pasco and fire up the command line mode of windows xp. (Hit Windows key + R, enter cmd and hit enter)

Change to the pasco dir and enter the following command:

pasco index.dat > urls.txt

Pasco creates a text file with all urls that are saved in the index.dat file. You can then view the with every text editor available. The same works with the index.dat that holds the cookies of course.

Ever wanted to know what your kids, husband, wife, friends, co-workers do when they are alone ? Use the index.dat file to find out.

How to remove the index.dat file:

The index.dat file is protected in windows and you will have a hard time deleting it from within.

These data files are used by Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer. You cannot delete a file that is in use by a running program. If you feel you need to delete the file, you will have to shutdown all instances of Explorer and IE. This includes applications that may host the Webbrowser control: Outlook, Messenger, IE, Product Studio, Visual Studio, Help, Windows Media Player, etc. Your best bet is just close everything. When you are left with a desktop and a start menu, you will still need to shutdown Explorer. To cleanly shutdown Explorer: Start->Shutdown->CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+Click ‘Cancel’ (for more info, see this post). You can use Task Manager (CTRL+SHIFT+ESC, File->Run…) at this point to open a command window. You should be able to go delete the index.dat. I have only tried this on XPSP2, but it should work anywhere.

thanks to Jeff for this information

Another way would be to boot either into safemode or dos to kill the file.

The new Internet Explorer 7 apparently fixes this issue.