Vista: How to Keep Users from Clearing IE’s History of Their Browsing

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Internet Explorer keeps a history of cookies, sites that have been visited, and form data. This history can be quite useful in tracking the browsing practices of an employee or your child (or even spouse). Many people are aware of the fact that they can delete this history from the browser, but you can take away this ability in situations that call for such action.

1. Click the Windows Orb and input gpedit.msc into the Start Search text box. Select gpedit.msc when it appears in the listing. Click Continue when the UAC prompt appears.

2. When the Group Policy Object Editor appears, go to the left pane and expand either Computer Configuration or User Configuration (depending on whether you wish to apply this to any user on the computer or just a specific user).

3. Expand Administrative Templates.

4. Expand Windows Components.

5. Expand Internet Explorer.

6. Select Delete Browsing History.

7. In the right pane, you will see the following listed:

Prevent Deleting Cookies

Prevent Deleting Web sites that the User has Visited

Prevent Deleting Temporary Internet Files

Prevent Deleting Favorites Site Data

Turn off "Delete Browsing History" funtionality

Prevent Deleting Form Data

Prevent Deleting of Passwords

Disable "Configuring History"

Prevent the deletion of temporary Internet files and cookies

8. Double click the desired setting. When the Properties window appears, select the Enabled radio button.

9. Click OK.

10. Repeat steps 8 and 9 until you have enabled all of the desired settings.

11. Close the Group Policy Object Editor.