Remove Google Chrome Autofill Entries Individually or All at Once!

With high speed internet readily available and lots of information available online, we are using internet more than we ever did. We use several websites with sign up forms, with search boxes, subscribe forms, profile box and more where we are required to fill in our details. Google Chrome by default remembers what you entered in a text box and next time when you’re filling the same form or a similar one, it’ll automatically prompt you to choose one of the available saved entries.

Just in case you don’t know what are autofill entries, have a look at the below screenshot that I just took. The autofill entries appeared when I double clicked or started to type something in the website field you can see in the snap below. Similar auto-fill entries show up when I click on the email field or the name field. Those entries may vary for you of course, but this is how the autofill entries generally show up..google chrome auto fill entries

Of course it’s a good feature to have and I absolutely love it, but over a period of time the number of auto fill entries increase so much that it becomes annoying to find the right entry. If there are too many entries, Google Chrome won’t show all of them and instead it’ll just show a few most used ones. So what if you want to use an entry you had used a long time back? It then becomes a time-consuming affair! Being a blogger, I often sign up on several sites. Moreover sometimes, my mom and dad use my laptop too. They usually don’t sign up to many sites, but they do subscribe to newsletters and also comment on some sites (their favorites include The Times of India, The Hindu & a couple of blogs). So whenever one of us is filling a form, say I’m trying to comment on a website, when I click on the email, I can see my mom’s and my dad’s email showing as well because of auto-complete. It’s fine since there are only three emails and it’s easy to find the one I like, but in certain fields, it just becomes difficult to find the right entry. Moreover, you might end up storing wrong entries or embarrassing ones sometimes that’ll haunt you if someone ever uses your browser. That’s when you want to get rid of the autofill entries that pile up over time or those annoy or embarrass you. So how do you do it?

Delete Autofill Entries on Google Chrome

Delete Individual Autofill Entries

Clearing all the autofill entries at once is what I practice, but sometimes you may require to delete individual entries. Here’s how to do it:

  1. ‘Double-click’ on the text field or click once & press the down arrow on your keyboard. The most used entries will appear on screen.
  2. ‘Highlight’ the one you wish to delete either by using your mouse or by using the up or down arrows on the keyboard.
  3. And then press ‘Shift & Delete simultaneously’ (Shift+Delete)
  4. If you’re on a Mac, you might have to press the fn key in addition to the above keys. So that makes it ‘fn+shift+delete’. If there’s no delete key, you can make the ‘backspace’ key to function as a delete key by pressing ‘fn+shift+backspace’ at once.

delete individual autofill entry

Update: You now need to press Shift & Delete simultaneously. Simply pressing the Delete key while highlighting the auto fill entry no longer works.

Delete All Autofill Entries at Once

If you don’t want to remove individual entries and go the bad-ass way by deleting all of them at once, here’s how you can do the same:

  1. Click on the ‘Menu’ icon just below the close window symbol to the top right of your screen -> Select ‘History. Alternatively you can also press Ctrl+H or go to Settings -> Click on History option on the left.
  2. Click on ”Clear Browsing Data’.
  3. Uncheck all except ‘Autofill form data’.
  4. Select the time period.
  5. Finally hit the ‘Clear browsing data’ button.

clear autofill data in google chrome

This will erase all the autofill entries stored in the browser. Once deleted, you cannot recover the autofill entries so make sure you don’t mind losing those entries and have them backed up on your brain.

3 Responses

  1. Lewis Pate

    Is there a way to delete all entries for a single form field. Shift+Delete works, but if you have 30 entries it becomes tedious.

    Reply
  2. Skip Folden

    Instructions no longer work for the chome email autofill field, and there is no longer any way to edit the autofill email field for that option has been long removed. Chrome is automatically filling in the google email address, whereas I never use that, nor have I ever put it into the email autofill section.

    Using shift delete has no effect to delete the email address chrome fills in now has no effect. I can still type in the correct address, of course, but this business of automatically filling in a google address is crass.

    Reply
  3. Anon

    Thankyou, your shift + delete solution works perfectly! I’ve been trying for ages to work out how to delete individual autofill entries. All other articles I found said to go into advanced settings >Passwords and forms, but this never showed any data.

    Reply

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