If you use Opera and have ever accidentally mistyped a URL that was earlier in the alphabet than the correct URL, you probably remember the annoyance it caused. For the benefit of those who don’t use Opera, the reason it’s annoying is that Opera uses the history to populate the dropdown box. The intent is to make your life easier, and it usually does. It will match URLs you’ve previously visited, and for sites you frequently visit, this can save you quite a bit of time. The problem is that the list is sorted, so if you typed in the wrong site, that mistake will return every time you try to go to the correct site.

For example, let’s say I love to visit news.google.com. The first time I go to the site, I have to type in the whole URL, but from then on, I can type n-e-w and, assuming you haven’t visited other sites that start with n-e-w, it will pull up the URL and you can just hit the down arrow and voila, you’re at the site. Now, if I accidentally type new.google.com, that site will be added to my history and when I type n-e-w it will pull that up before the one I really want to visit.

For a while I would just live with it because I didn’t want to delete my entire history and I didn’t know of another way to solve it, but I now have a better solution. You can remove individual URLs from your history. To do this, go to your history (Ctrl-Alt-H or Tools > History) and begin typing the domain in the search box. It will display all matching web sites which you can then click on and delete either by hitting the delete key or by right clicking and selecting the delete menu option.