Edit Your Browser’s AutoFill or AutoComplete–and Protect Your Credit Cards

Tom Guthrie wants to selectively dispatch the usernames, passwords, and other bits of text from his browser's AutoFill–or AutoComplete–feature.

I love the direction that modern browsers automatically fill in these fields, although roughly W. C. Fields I'd rather they left unfilled. I don't trustfulness a browser with the password for a retail operating theater banking site, and I'm certainly not prosperous when one offers to fill in my credit tease number.

And sometimes they wish to fill in information that's exterior-of-see or just plain wrong.

As luck would have it, you toilet delete AutoFills. Here's how to do so in the current versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer:

Firefox

This unity is very simple. When Firefox fills in a field that you'd kind of be left unfilled–OR filled with something else–click the field. A pull-down menu will appear with one or more options. Aim the sneak away to the one you deficiency to remove, thusly that the option is highlighted. But Don River't click IT. Instead, mechanical press the DELETE key to remove the option.

Chrome

Google's web browser offers a couple of ways to do this, and has the best solutions of the three.

The best and fastest way is to do incisively what I represented preceding in Firefox. When the pull down-down menu appears, point to, but don't click, the item you want removed. When information technology's highlighted, entreat DELETE.

But Chrome offers more. If you enter your name and address into combined site's net form, it will remember altogether the Fields jointly and offer to use them on other sites. IT does this not only with addresses but besides with credit cards–although I strongly suggest you refuse when Chrome offers to save credit card information.

You tooshie do more than much select-and-delete these types of AutoFills. When the drop-cut down menu appears with the first field's options, click Chrome Autofill options at the menu's bottom. That brings up an Autofill Options yellow journalism where you can select various addresses and credit cards. Should one of your addresses contain inaccurate information, you can double-click it for redaction. Operating theater you can select an address and get through the X that appears on the right to erase it.

Internet Explorer

Microsoft's web browser doesn't let you blue-pencil individual AutoComplete entries. Your lone pick (excursus from a very decelerate and difficult Registry-editing trick) is to erase wholly of them.

Click the Tool ikon in the upper-powerful corner and select Internet options. Click the Content tab. In the AutoComplete section, snap the Settings button.

In the resulting dialog box, click the Delete AutoComplete chronicle button. Micturate sure that either Form data or Passwords (or some) are patterned in front clicking Delete.

Contributing Editor President Lincoln Spector writes about technology and cinema. Email your technical school questions to him at answer@pcworld.com, Beaver State Wiley Post them to a community of interests of helpful folk on the PCW Do Line assembly.