How To Prevent Users from Deleting IE Browsing History

I’ve previously written several articles on how you can delete your Internet Explorer browsing history using a plugin, delete browsing history manually, or delete just your Google search history.

This is all great for those who want to get rid of any trace of the websites they visited, but what if you want to make sure that someone cannot delete the browsing history on a computer?

Is there any way to prevent someone from deleting or erasing the Google search history and the history of websites visited? Yes! If you want monitor which websites your child, spouse, employee, etc are visiting, then you can use Group Policy in Windows Vista to make sure it cannot be deleted.

Here’s how! First, click on the Start button and type in GPEDIT.MSC in the Instant Search box.

Now on the left hand side, you can either expand Computer Configuration or User Configuration. Choose the former if you want to apply the settings for all users that use the computer and the latter if you only want these settings for the currently logged in user.

Now expand Administrative Templates, Windows Components, Internet Explorer and chooseDelete Browsing History.

Note that you may not have a Delete Browsing History option and if not, then all of the settings will be underInternet Explorer, like shown above. Now you want to find each one of these settings and configure them as Enabled.

Disable “Configuring History”

Prevent the deletion of temporary Internet files and cookies

Turn off “Delete Browsing History” functionality

Turn off “Delete Forms” functionality

Turn off “Delete Passwords” functionality

Disable changing Temporary Internet files settings

Disable changing Advanced page settings

Once you enable all of those settings in Group Policy, make sure to restart the computer. In order to enable an option, you have to double-click on it and choose Enabled.

Now when someone browses the Internet on that computer using Internet Explorer, then they will not be able to delete their browsing history, temporary Internet files, cookies, filled-in forms, or passwords.

Note that this will only work for Internet Explorer! If someone decides to use Firefox or Google Chrome, etc, then they can delete the history for those browsers, regardless of what the group policy settings are.

If you want to be able to track Internet browsing history regardless of what browser someone is using, you’ll have to use some kind of third-party software to do that. Earlier, I wrote about how you can use Google Desktop to monitor computer usage. Enjoy! 

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How to Access Files Cached by a Web Browser

Web browsers store copies of recently viewed pages and all associated media (images, audio, and video) in a folder on your hard disk, called the cache. This improves performance when you’re surfing, but also makes it easy to grab copies of media files—such as Flash videos or .flv files—for storage elsewhere.

Internet Explorer’s cache folder is \Users\{username}\AppData\Local\ Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files. In IE, go to Tools ➝ Internet Options, click Settings in the Browsing history section, and then click View files.

You can verify this location under the Internet Options > General Tab > Browsing History settings:

Click View files:

Sort the list by file type to group all the files together, and then drag the file out of the folder or double-click them to open.

If you are not using IE, neither Mozilla Firefox nor Mozilla SeaMonkey assign filename extensions for their cached files, so you’ll have to do a little detective work to find a recently viewed file type. If you’re using Mozilla Firefox, open the Cache subfolder of \Users\{username}\AppData\Local\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles, and sort the listing by date.

If you see a particularly large file with a date sometime in the last few minutes, try adding the right extension to its filename, and then double-click it to open it.

If the file opens correctly, go ahead and copy the file out of the cache; otherwise, undo the rename and try again with a different file.

Use the tips mentioned above to be able to grab files used by web pages.

Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done!

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