The omni­bar on my Google Chrome browser was get­ting really slow. As I type into it, each char­ac­ter takes up to a sec­ond to appear. A quick google revealed that it is caused by an over­loaded his­tory. I haven’t cleared my his­tory for a long time. It makes sense. Because the omni­bar checks the his­tory and looks for pages related to what you are typ­ing. It’s a great fea­ture that saves time but if your his­tory is bloated, typ­ing slows because of all the pro­cess­ing in the background.

So I had to clear my his­tory to fix the omni­bar. I have five options. I could clear an hour, a day, a week, four weeks’ worth or all of my browser his­tory. The prob­lem is I wanted my his­tory, at least the last few weeks. I don’t have the habit of book­mark­ing things. I some­times real­ize I needed to go to a page which did not inter­est me the first time. I would find it in my his­tory. What I really needed to clear was the less rel­e­vant his­tory before that.

All the major web browsers have got this wrong. On Safari, you can only clear all your his­tory. Fire­fox lets you clear an hour, two hours, four hours and everything.

The right way would thus be to offer options like:

• every­thing
• an hour and before
• a day and before
• a week and before
• 4 weeks and before

What about peo­ple who really want to do it the other way round? Like for porn. Maybe both types of options should be present.