Recently Google announced about Privacy tools and features it is rolling out with Chrome 83, the features still not available, but you can get them now if you want. However, the company has quietly enabled a change in Chrome stable to allow users to delete suggestions in the address bar using the mouse.
When you start typing in Chrome Omnibox, Chrome displays relevant suggestions from history and bookmarks.
If you don’t want any particular suggestion to show up for privacy reasons, you need to select in the dropdown and use the Shift+Delete button to delete it.
This is not a good experience for the user and Google from the beginning always wanted to make users discover a UI that allows deleting suggestions with ease.
Initially, Google tested showing a trash or x icon at the end of the suggestion and right-click context menu option via the “Omnibox suggestions transparency options” flag.
Currently, on Desktop, it’s possible to delete some Omnibox Suggestions using the keyboard shortcut Shift+Delete.
This is not very discoverable and mostly unknown to users.
This bug is to add some kind of discoverable UI to users to allow them to delete suggestions that can be deleted (ones that are sourced from their History, for instance).
The current two approaches we are considering are:
– A X or Trash Icon on the right hand side of the suggestion.
– A right-click context menu.
Chromium team favored former over latter and enabled the related flag by default in recently released Chrome.
Omnibox Suggestion Transparency Options
Surfaces an X button next to deletable omnibox suggestions. This is to make the suggestion removal feature more discoverable. – Mac, Windows, Linux, Chrome OS, Android
The flag is getting axed right now.
How to delete suggestions in the Chrome address bar using Mouse
1. Launch Chrome browser
2. Start to type, hover over the unwanted suggestion in the dropdown you want to delete for ‘x’ icon to appear
3. Click on it to remove it.
Which do you prefer to remove suggestions now? Keyboard or mouse? Let us know your comments below.
Related articles:
Microsoft Edge v82 enables Chrome’s Similar or Lookalike URL Suggestions
Chrome tests Keyword Search, Tab Switch and Pedal suggestions in Omnibox
Chrome may soon display tab switch suggestions in a dedicated row
