When you begin to type in the address bar (and other data entry fields), the browser displays a dropdown list of alternatives. This is nice, but eventually gets excessive, and may contain out of date, incorrect, or simply embarrassing links or other information. This new feature allows you to right click delete items from that list, as you come across them.
-- pluterday, Feb 09 2003

[Jutta] I'm using Explorer, so I tried that on Netscape 7.0, but it looks like you might have to look thru a lot of stuff to find what you want to delete, whereas from the dropdown, you are already right there.
-- pluterday, Feb 09 2003


On Windows 98, deleting items from the subdirectories in "windows\history\" seems to remove them from autocomplete. You'll see there are directories called "Today", "Thursday", etc, which store all the web pages you have visited. IE appears to use this history for the autocomplete field. You can also display the history pane in Internet Explorer (CTRL-H) and right-click on the individual elements to delete them.

(I imagine pluterday's suggested feature isn't integrated into the autocomplete list because it uses a standard list control to display the elements, and the list control doesn't support deletion.)
-- pottedstu, Feb 09 2003


The right-click would pull up a context-sensitive menu of all things it could do with the text, including cut, paste, etc. This would necessitate another selection and click to remove it.

You *can* just press the Delete key on the selected item in the list to delete it...
-- Cedar Park, Feb 09 2003


Nice catch, Cedar, I was unaware that feature existed in IE. Experimenting just now, I discovered IE is even smart enough to notice if the entry you are deleting is for a username prompt that it has also stored the password for, and will ask whether you want it to "forget" the password too.
-- krelnik, Feb 10 2003


[krelnik] What version of IE are you using? I'm stilll using 5.5 SP2 and all it does is select the link without navigating to it in my version. Doesn't even attempt to delete the link.
-- ton80, Feb 10 2003


I'm also using 5.5. But pluter, Cedar and I are talking about the little auto-complete boxes that drop down from text entry fields in online forms. I think you are talking about the drop-down history picker out of the address bar (URL box). Two different things, though really they should both support this.
-- krelnik, Feb 10 2003


I'm using 6.0 now, but my old P200 using 5.0 does it too.
-- Cedar Park, Feb 10 2003


//simply embarrassing links // I type in Pencil sharpeners & before I get there, "pencil neck boss gets beaten by angry secretary" comes up. Oops!.
-- Zimmy, Apr 30 2005


Sometimes you come across simple functions that you never knew existed and wonder why you didn't know that. Autocomplete has been one of the minor irritations in my life for as long as I can remember and only a couple of days ago I discovered that, when the autocomplete drop down list apppears, you can just use the down arrow key to move to the item you want to get rid of and hit delete to remove it from the list. Why didn't someone tell me this ten years ago?
-- DrBob, May 02 2005



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