A few months ago, Google introduced a new way for users to quickly delete the last 15 minutes of their browser history on Chrome. Dubbed Quick Delete, the feature was unveiled at Google I/O this past May and comes in handy if you embarked on a sensitive search without first going into incognito mode.
What is Quick Delete
While Apple has positioned privacy as a cornerstone of the iOS user experience, it’s not as if Google is taking the opposite approach. On the contrary, Google at its developer conference this year introduced several privacy-oriented features, with Quick Delete perhaps being the most noteworthy.
Before Quick Delete, deleting your browser history on Chrome was only available in five distinct time increments. You could either delete the last hour, the last 24 hours, the last week, or the last month of your browser history. You also had an option to delete the entirety of your browser history.
While helpful, the available time increments were somewhat limiting. Sometimes, for example, you only want to delete your most recent searches without necessarily erasing a full hour or day’s worth of browsing history.
And so, Google developed Quick Delete.
How to delete the last 15 minutes of your Google Chrome history
Taking advantage of Quick Delete is pretty quick and simple. The first thing you’ll want to do is open up the Google application on your iPhone or Android device. Next, tap the profile icon located on the upper right-hand corner of the display. You should see an option to “Delete last 15 min.” Once you press that, the last 15 minutes of your Chrome history will be deleted. Note that you’ll see a confirmation page that “Deleting Search history from your Google Account. Changes will Show soon.” The message also contains an “Undo” option if you accidentally select it by mistake
As a quick aside, Google over the years has baked in all sorts of nice power-user features into its Chrome browser. We’ve highlighted a few of them over here.
