Erase all evidence from your PC

How do you make sure that other people in the family don’t get to know about the websites you visited last night? Amit Agarwal tells you.

Consider this: you are sharing a computer at home, there aren't any separate user logins and all family members use the same Firefox browser (v 3.1) to surf the Web. How do you make sure that other people in the family don't get to know about the websites you visited last night?

Well, you have a couple of options — you can either delete your entire Web history (including browser cache) to wipe off all your tracks but this may not be the best option since this action will also clear all your frequently accessed web pages from the address bar.

The recommended option is that you selectively remove websites from the history and luckily, Firefox 3.1 includes some brilliant features to help you do so.

Forget about this site: This option is recommended if you want to erase only a couple of websites from your browser's history.

Press Ctrl+H to access your web history in the Firefox sidebar, type some characters in the search box to find the website(s) that you want to remove, right click and select the "Forget About This Site" option.

This option lets you delete the either entire domain (like google.com) or even a sub-domain (like images.google.com) from your browser history.

Or just a page: If you like to selectively delete only a couple of web pages from the history (and not the entire website), just right click the web page title in the History box and select "Delete This Page" or hit the Del key on your keyboard.

Clear Recent History: If you want to erase all the Web activity in the past hour or so, press Ctrl+Shift+Del in Firefox to open the "Clear Recent History" dialog and select "the last two hours" or "my history for today" option.
Amit Agarwal writes a technology blog at http://www.labnol.org/