How To Clear Your Browsing Data

by Myrel Nginsayan, Amara Lite · Published July 29, 2022 · Updated April 28, 2023

Here are three reasons why you should clear your browsing activities.

Browsing History; What is browsing history?

Whenever you visit a website, your browser keeps record of it with the date and time you accessed it, we call this browsing history. This feature that is available to all web browsers is very useful especially if you want to revisit a certain website and cannot remember the web address. It also makes the web page load faster because of the saved data.

In clearing the browsing history, you are protecting the user’s privacy and clearing the auto-fill forms data.

Cookies and other site data; What is cookies?

Browser cookies are bits of information that the server gathers every time someone does something on the internet. This is stored in a small folder and contains pieces of information about the user such as log in information and preferences like the sites that the user frequents, how long the sessions are, and the things that the user usually searches for. These are meant to give the user a better browsing experience.

Clearing the cookies makes sure you’re logged out of all the websites you just accessed so that no one else can sit down and use your accounts.

Cached images and files; What are these?

Cached data are gathered information about a website that a user visited. This is intended to make the user’s online experience smoother because it decreases the loading time of web pages when the user revisits a website. Images, videos, and large files mostly take time to load but because of cache, it becomes faster.

In clearing your cached data, you will be able to fix certain issues such as partially loaded or poorly formatted webpages or to free up some space.

How to clear your browsing data

Step 1:

Open your Google Chrome then click on the three dots located on the left side of the window.

Step 2:

Hover on “More tools” and then another menu will pop up.

Step 3:

Click on “Clear browsing data…” or press Ctrl + Shift + Del.

Step 4:

A window will pop up and will ask you to choose the data that you want to clear. Under the “Basic” tab, you are given three options to clear. Below are the options and their explanations.

In this example, we choose to clear all the options. However, you can just choose one or two options by ticking the box on the right-hand side.

Step 5:

Choose the time range that you want to clear. You can choose to clear all your browsing data in the last hour, in the last 24 hours, last 7 days, last 4 weeks, or all the time.