You can delete Chrome or Firefox history records in BrowsingHistoryView now
BrowsingHistoryView is a portable application for Windows by Nirsoft that users could use up until now to view the browsing history of multiple browsers in a single interface.
The latest update of the application to version 2.35 introduces support for deleting individual browsing history records from Chrome and Firefox. Nir Sofer notes that the deleting will also work in browsers that share the same architecture; Waterfox, SeaMonkey, Vivaldi, and Yandex are mentioned in particularly. It should also work in the new Microsoft Edge web browser, Opera, and other compatible browsers.
Interested users may download the new version of BrowserHistoryView from the Nirsoft website. The application is available for 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Microsoft's Windows operating system including all supported versions but also versions that are no longer supported by Microsoft.
BrowserHistoryView supports numerous browsers including Firefox, Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera. You can run the program right after you have extracted the downloaded archive. It launches two windows, one to display all options and the other to display the results.
The options window provides lots of customization options. You can hit the ok button right away to use the defaults; if you do, BrowsingHistoryView parses the histories of all supported web browsers and displays the data in chronological order in the second window.
As far as options are concerned, you may deselect browsers, filter the data by date and time, by URLs or location/user.
The results are displayed in the usual Nirsoft way. The data is displayed in a table and you may sort it with a click on any header.
The listing indicates the browser, URL/resource, title if available, visit time and count, and more information.
Besides using BrowsingHistoryView to get an overview of all visited sites in the selected browsers, it may now also be used to delete date from the browser's records.
The functionality is supported in Chrome and Firefox, as well as browsers that share the code. All it takes is to right-click on the selection and activate the "Delete Selected History Records" option to delete the entries. Note that it may be necessary to close the web browsers before the delete operation is run.
BrowsingHistoryView will delete the records after confirmation. The record is removed from the table if the operation succeeds. There is no option to restore deleted browsing history records.
Closing Words
The new ability to delete history records is a very useful addition to the application. The option to view records from all browsers in a single interface was handy but lack of actions, other than exporting options, limited the program's effectiveness.
The addition of the delete options increases the usefulness as it is now possible to delete records from some of the most popular desktop browsers.
Shows explorer history (DOCX’s, XLSX’s, PDF’s, &c.), which history cannot be deleted even running as admin. I suppose it might be done but stopping explorer first, but I don’t have the patience to confirm that, at least not just yet.
Inspired by Martin Brinkmann’s article, I tried it.
I use (for both practical use and test purposes) many browsers.
https://i.imgur.com/ZaLlViq.png
According to the list in BrowsingHistoryView, “their history was not found at all”, but IE that we did not use voluntarily turned out to have a history!
https://i.imgur.com/iujfCHO.png
BrowsingHistoryView 64-bit “search results” are displayed instantly.
Very, I felt beneficial.
My system environment: Windows 10 (x64) Version 1903 (build 18362.535)
BrowsingHistoryView – View browsing history of your Web browsers | nirsoft.net
https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/browsing_history_view.html
It works if you run as admin and close your browsers.
Run as admin and close the browsers, then it works at least for me.
Windows Defender (win10) disallows it here.
Ctrl + shift + del or cmd + shift + backspace?
Opened Chromium, went to a number of random sites, opened History tab in Chromium, they all showed up. None appeared in BrowsingHistoryView.
Closed Chromium, reopened and all the same sites are still there, since Chromium will not delete data on close.
Clicked Forget Button extension on shortcut bar and history disappeared immediately in the browser tab. ChromeCacheView (nirsoft) confirmed deletion.
Repeated the process without the last step, opened ChromeCacheView (nirsoft) just to be sure the data collected was visible outside Chromium and it was but did not appear in BrowsingHistoryView. NirSoft has great utilities; I use many of them but this one doesn’t seem to work.
Not sure what this utility is good for when a simple extension can delete, with one click, myriad categories of data Chromia collect.
ChromeCacheView is excellent, at least from the standpoint of seeing all the stuff Chromia keep at shutdown regardless of which settings are changed. FF keeps nothing if that’s how it’s set.
Opened Chromium, went to a number of random sites, opened History tab in Chromium, they all showed up. None appeared in BrowsingHistoryView.
Closed Chromium, reopened and all the same sites are still there, since Chromium will not delete data on close.
Clicked Forget Button extension on shortcut bar and history disappeared immediately.
Repeated the process without the last step, opened ChromeCacheView (nirsoft) just to be sure the data was being collected outside Chromium and it was but did not appear in BrowsingHistoryView.
I got it to delete 100 entries but it took a minute or two – use very little cpu.
It would good to have something that could delete 1000s of (say) localhost urls at a time.
This is about the same if I do it in Firefox.
I guess the history file is in a local db format not principally designed for bulk deletion.
And it won’t even delete one. Too bad, so sad.
Tried it. It won’t actually delete anything. Not too practical when I want to delete over 4000 entries.
I could not delete in Chrome history until I right clicked a selected entry and chose to delete it. That worked. However after restarting Chrome and clearing its temporary files, and then going to new tab and partially entering the same url, the full url was still shown as an autofill option, even though BrowsingHistoryView.exe could no longer find the url.