Google Chrome address bar is slow, can't delete URLs with clock icon from history

Question

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.

Answer 1

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

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Mac OS X

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

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Windows Vista:

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

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Deleting other history files does nothing.

Answer 2

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".

Answer 3

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.