Clearing old browsing data in Chrome instead of newer data

Unfortunately, it seems that the Chrome developers only catered to adolescents needing to hide browsing history from their parents. Us older people need therefore to use third-party software, or use a database browser to attack directly the history database.

Here are a couple of add-ons that might help. They are not recent, and I do not know if they still work :

  • eHistory - Enhanced History (last updated February 15, 2014)
  • History Limiter (last updated June 8, 2011 !)

In the Do It Yourself way, see the thread How can I delete all web history that matches a specific query in Google Chrome, where two solutions are proposed :

  1. Hacking the Chrome history page itself, chrome://history-frame/, by JavaScript injection, although the described solution deletes all history, so still needs to be improved to work in a selective manner.

  2. Using an SQL viewer to manipulate directly the Chrome History database, normally found under Windows as the file %localappdata%\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\History, as is detailed in this answer. I suspect that this approach is probably the most likely to work.