Just in case no better answer is given, I found a workaround by mere chance. Another program (Play Store) decided to open some web-page. Since Chrome was a default browser, it launched Chrome with a new tab. This means that the last opened tab (which was my problematic one) was not made active and hence Chrome hasn't tried to display it.
Is there any way to clear user data (i.e. History, extensions, etc.) and starting from a brand new google chrome experience without opening google chrome? I have attempted uninstalling and reinstalling, however that retains my bookmarks, history, extensions, cookies, etc. And I do not want any of these.
I was then able to close that tab as usual, and then open it again. This time Chrome downloaded the content from the web and since I corrected it, the problem was resolved.
Use sqlitebrowser. The history is saved as a sqlite database file (.db IIIRC) somewhere in AppData, under Google Chrome.
You can look through it easily. I'm sure you can find other programs with a better interface, but sqlitebrowser is more than adequate. Some relevant links: (displays unixtime as human-readable timestamps) In the Google Chrome userdata folder, you can invoke: sqlite History 'select datetime(lastvisittime/104473600,'unixepoch'),url from urls order by lastvisittime desc' historyexport.txt, and have a full dump ordered by lastvisittime in historyreport.txt As an alternative, there's this: I have used it long ago, and it worked adequately. I agree with the other answers saying that you can edit the history 'under the hood' by accessing the database directly. This only bypasses any logging mechanisms that chrome have in place to log changes to the history database.
SQLLite is a file database, (but the following still holds for other dbms) the data is a file on the OS's file system which means its last access and modification times are kept by the file system. So normally any change to the database will eventually find its to the file on disk (when the data is flushed fron memory). You can mitigate that by changing the system's clock and then changing it back.
But this leads to a change in the registry and so on and so on. My point is that doing something under the OS supervision without leaving any traces is hard.
Frankly the deciding factor will be how far each of you are willing to go. If you open a link from the browser history, it will be noticeable because the opened link will appear again in the history. If you open a recently visited link, the visited link will move to the top of the history, i.e. The access time will be updated (I don't know what exactly counts as recent, I think it's up to 1 hour).
In the first case you could delete the new entry from the history. In the second case there is only one entry, so deleting it would be suspicious - but leaving it would also be suspicious because the access time has changed. The simple non-technical solution to this is to open any link from the history in a new incognito window. I think this should be sufficient in most cases where the other user is only inspecting the history. It likely also prevents some of the techniques computer experts would use to determine if a site has been visited (e.g. Inspecting browser cache or browser logs) but it won't help if the network traffic is monitored.
I had the same issue, and I solved it by when I opened a new tab to view/edit History, make sure your home page is fully loaded, then go into History and do whatever you need to. Then hit the back arrow, and it will take you back to your browser's home page.
The reason that I didn't close it when History was still open was because, you could go into recently closed, and it would show that History was opened. My version of Chrome does not allow me to delete an entry under the 'Recently closed' option. Or, do as others have already commented, use Incognito mode.