Is your Google Chrome browser running slower than usual, or even crashing? Unnecessary plugins, extensions, and accumulated browsing data can bog down your browser's performance. This guide will show you how to disable or remove these culprits and clear browsing data to improve Chrome's speed and stability.
As you browse the web, Chrome’s history database collects URLs and cached texts for websites you’ve visited, your download history, cookies, and other website and plugin data. While the point of the history and cache database are to speed up your computer by caching things locally instead of having to download every time, sometimes the history database can become very large and may slow down Chrome.
Clear Your Entire Browsing History
To clear your entire browsing history, click the "three dots" icon on the right side of the toolbar More tools -> Clear browsing data from the drop-down menu.
NOTE: Clearing your entire browsing history prevents matches from displaying when you start typing URLs in the address bar.
In the Clear browsing data dialog, select the items you want to clear and select a time range from the drop-down list. Click Clear browsing data to clear the selected data. When the Clear browsing data dialog closes, the Settings tab opens. To close it, click the red X button on the tab.
Clear Specific Items from Your Browsing History
If you want to delete the history for only specific webpages, click the "three dots" icon on the right side of the toolbar and select History from the drop-down menu. Move your mouse over a webpage you want to remove from the history list and select the check box that displays. Once you have selected all the webpages you want to remove, click Remove selected items.
A confirmation dialog box displays. Click OK if you are sure you want to remove the webpages from the history list.
Extensions are small programs available in the Chrome Web Store that add extra features and functionality to Chrome. They can be very useful, but if you end up with a lot of extensions installed, the browser’s speed may be negatively affected. You can easily disable extensions without uninstalling them to gain some speed.
Some extensions install a button on Chrome’s address bar, and those can be quickly removed (Uninstalled) by right-clicking on them and choosing Uninstall from the menu.
You can also install apps in Chrome, that are accessible on the New Tab page. These can also be disabled.
To access your list of installed extensions and apps, click the "three dots" icon on the right side of the toolbar More tools -> Extensions from the drop-down menu. You can uninstall extensions with buttons without accessing this list, but you might be surprised that some extensions are in the list that don’t have a button.
To disable an extension, click the Enabled check box to the right of the extension’s title in the list so there is no check mark in the box.
The Enabled check box becomes an Enable check box, allowing you to re-enable the extension at any time.
NOTE: You can also easily remove any extensions or apps (not managed by JOCUSD) you don’t want any more by clicking the trash can icon to the right of the Enabled check box.
Clear Your Browsing History from the New Tab Page
The New Tab page displays thumbnails for the websites you visit most (depending on the version of Chrome you are using). You can clear your browsing history by removing these thumbnails from the New Tab page.
To remove a webpage from the New Tab page, move your mouse over the thumbnail for the site and click the X that displays in the upper, right corner of the thumbnail.
NOTE: You can reset the New Tab page to blank thumbnails by clearing your entire browsing history, as mentioned earlier.
You can also remove a thumbnail from the New Tab page, by dragging it to the Remove from Chrome trash can, which only displays once you start dragging a thumbnail.