Hide Omnibox Suggestions for Chrome™

Conceal suggestions in the Chrome Omnibox (Search and Address bar).

Hide Omnibox Suggestions for Chrome™ Stop your past searches from reappearing every time you click the address bar. WHAT PROBLEM DOES THIS SOLVE? Click into the address bar on a new tab page in Chrome, before you have typed a single character, and the browser immediately drops down a list of your ten most recent Google searches. Everything you looked up yesterday, last week, and last month is suddenly on screen — in a meeting, during a screen share, in a lecture hall, or simply when a friend borrows your laptop for a moment. Since Chrome 86, there is no setting that turns this behaviour off. It is not in Privacy and security, it is not in Appearance, and it is not behind a flag. Chrome has removed the switch, and there is no official workaround. Hide Omnibox Suggestions for Chrome™ gives you that switch back. HOW IT WORKS The extension watches for search pages as you visit them and removes the matching entries from your browsing history right away, before Chrome ever has the chance to surface them as omnibox suggestions. No suggestion, because no stored entry to suggest. Google search is handled automatically out of the box. The moment you install the extension, it also performs a one-time cleanup, clearing up to 5,000 Google search entries from the previous month so that you start from a clean slate rather than waiting for old results to age out. If your history reaches back further than a month and you want that removed too, you can clear it manually from Chrome's own history page. From that point on, everything happens quietly in the background. There is nothing to launch, nothing to remember to switch on, and no daily maintenance. Install it once, and the address bar simply stops volunteering your search history. ADD YOUR OWN SITES Google is only the default. Search engines are not the only places that leave a revealing trail — job boards, medical and health sites, dating apps, shopping carts, forums, ticketing systems, internal company tools and webmail all produce URLs you may not want appearing in a dropdown in front of other people. Open the options page and add your own URL prefixes. Any page whose address begins with a prefix you have added will have its history entry removed automatically, exactly as Google search is. When you add a new prefix, the extension also cleans up to 5,000 existing matching entries from the past month, so the rule applies retroactively as well as going forward. You can keep up to five custom prefixes alongside the built-in Google rule. That cap is deliberate: matching every visit against a long list of patterns would slow your browsing down, and five prefixes covers the sites that matter for most people without any noticeable cost. A "Clear history for all added sites" button lets you sweep every configured site, Google included, on demand. Finding the right prefix is straightforward. Press Ctrl+H to open your history, look at the address of the page you want covered, and copy the leading portion — for Google search, that is "https://www.google." — which is deliberately cut short so that it matches google.com, google.co.uk, google.de and every other regional domain at once. Prefixes must begin with http, https or ftp. BUILT FOR PRIVACY, BY DESIGN This extension asks for exactly two permissions, and it uses both of them for the feature you installed it for. The "history" permission is what allows entries to be removed — the entire purpose of the extension. The "storage" permission holds your list of custom prefixes so that it persists between sessions and follows you to your other signed-in Chrome installations. That is the complete list. There are no content scripts, so the extension never reads or touches the pages you visit. It makes no network requests of any kind: nothing you browse, search, or configure is transmitted anywhere, because there is nowhere for it to be transmitted to. No analytics, no tracking, no accounts, no telemetry. It works entirely offline, and it is built on Manifest V3, Chrome's current and most restrictive extension platform. Your prefix list stays yours. BEFORE YOU START One important note. If Chrome history sync is enabled on your account, your synced devices can push deleted entries straight back to your local history, and suggestions will keep reappearing. If the extension does not seem to be working, this is almost always the reason. To turn sync off: Settings → You and Google → Sync and Google services → Manage what you sync → choose "Customize sync" → switch off "History". AVAILABLE IN 43 LANGUAGES The full interface is translated into 43 languages, including Arabic, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Russian, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Turkish, Vietnamese, Thai, Hebrew, Persian and many more. GETTING TO THE SETTINGS Right-click the extension icon and choose "Options", or click the icon and select Options from the popup. Install it once. Click your address bar without flinching.