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I can't delete history items or visited webpages from Google Chrome that have the clock icon.

I recently visited some websites with very long URLs with about 600,000 characters each. Ever since, typing in my address bar has been very slow after the first few characters, even with auto-prediction turned off. Or even when the data URL does not appear in the suggested results.

I would like to delete these URLs from my history to (hopefully) solve my problem, but clearing the cache does not seem to work. It will delete everything except these data URLs.

I've also tried Shift+Delete in the address bar, which works for other URLs, but not these.

Apparently they won't work using Shift+Delete because these URLs have a clock icon and not a globe icon next to their name. I'm not sure what that signifies.

3 Answers 3

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Manually deleting the History Provider Cache file seems to do the trick. Find it at the following:


Mac OS X

~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/

Windows Vista:

C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default

Deleting other history files does nothing.

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  • Sorry to hear you're having issues, hopefully this solution provides some temporary relief. My original issue was fixed by the Chromium team: code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=86516
    – Jeff
    Mar 9, 2013 at 21:05
  • @Jeff I don't see any solution in that thread. Aug 3, 2013 at 2:13
  • @ButtleButkus the solution is to update Chrome. there was a bug in the source code which was fixed.
    – Jeff
    Aug 8, 2013 at 3:46
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    Fast forward 4 years later, Chrome 42.0 still has this problem. I recreated my user profile as a last resort. This did not solve the problem. (Windows 8.1, fast computer, 16GB RAM). Omnibox has approx a second of delay before characters appear.
    – Shailen
    May 17, 2015 at 11:12
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You have tried to clear all your browsing data? Which you would get to from the tool icon. There you can clear all browsing data "from the beginning of time".

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  • Yes, it won't delete the data urls. they don't even show up when i go to 'show full history'
    – Jeff
    Jun 17, 2011 at 16:36
  • Are these data URLs in your favorites/bookmarks? You can try removing them or even slimming down you favorites to see if that helps.
    – chrsblck
    Jun 17, 2011 at 16:58
  • Nope, they're not in my favorites. I don't think the problem has anything to do with my favorites (I don't have that many), but thanks...
    – Jeff
    Jun 17, 2011 at 17:15
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Delete the history provider cache file. Download SQLite and use it to search all of the files in the appdata-local-google-chrome-default folder. Browse through the tables and delete the records which you don't want to show up in the address bar.

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