Look, what you do on the internet is between you and your ISP. Or, at least it should be. Hand someone your phone, however, and all of a sudden they have access to anything and everything in your browsing history. Yikes.
It’s not hard to clear your history on Chrome, but it also isn’t necessarily instant, either, meaning many of us just let the history build up without thinking about it much.
Google has made things easier in the past, but only if you used the right app. To quickly clear your browsing history, you could fire up the Google app, tap your profile in the top right, then choose “Delete last 15 min” to do just that—an easy way to clear your extremely recent history.
The only problem with this, however, is you needed to use the Google app. Which do you use more? The Google app, or Chrome? I imagine it’s the latter, and that makes sense—when most of us browse the internet on own phones, it’s through a web browser. Why this feature didn’t make it to Chrome is a mystery to me, but it’s finally changing.
How to quickly clear last 15 minutes of Google Chrome history
That’s now changing: Google is rolling out an update to Chrome on Android so users can clear their last 15 minutes of browsing history directly from the source. Once the feature hits your device, you can fire up Chrome, tap the three-dot menu in the top right, then choose “Clear browsing data.” “Last 15 minutes” should be the default, but you can tap this menu to change the time range of deletion. Then, just hit “Clear data” to wipe the slate clean. You’ll see a “Last 15 minutes cleared” alert appear to confirm.
Again, clearing your history wasn’t too hard before this feature debuted—you could tap the same three-dot menu, choose “History,” then hit “Clear browsing data” and choose “Last 15 minutes” to accomplish the same. This method still exists, but hey—efficiency of any kind is much appreciated.