Ten years ago, people used to be very careful about clearing the web browsing history on their desktop computers because they were afraid someone could easily find out what they have been doing on the internet. Now smartphones pose the same threat to a greater extent. Unlike the older desktop computers where the person has to be sitting in front of the PC to find out about your browsing habits, now anybody can quickly pick up your smartphone and check your browsing history in a few seconds. Other than the obvious solution of using a password to lock your smartphone, you should also clear your browsing history from time to time. This will not only boost your privacy but also remove some files in the browser cache and make your phone a tad faster.
If you are using an Android smartphone, then there are more chances of your using the Chrome web browser which often comes pre-installed in Android devices. If you want to clean your browsing history in the Chrome browser for Android, then you can follow these simple steps:
- Open Chrome browser in Android. Then tap on the menu button at the bottom of the screen. Usually this menu button is located near the lower-left side of your Android device. In the menu that shows up, you have to select History as shown in the picture:
- This will show all of your web browsing history in a list containing all the URLs and domain names that you have visited in Chrome. You can tap on Clear Browsing Data at the bottom to start clearing the browsing history.
- Another window shall popup giving you all the options that you can choose to clean. You can select to clear the browsing history, cache, cookies, site data, passwords and the auto-fill data from here. It is suggested that you select them all to thoroughly clear everything. You should also keep in my mind that if you choose to clear passwords, all of your saved passwords will be removed.
- Now you can go ahead and tap on the Clear button. It will take a few seconds before all of your browsing history in Chrome is purged.
After clearing the browsing history in the Chrome browser for Android, you can start using it again as usual. Nothing will be different except all of your previous browsing traces would have disappeared forever.