Microsoft Edge - why does it display 'private browsing' history?

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Evening all

Been a while since I posted or visited here so apologies in advance if this particular topic has been explored before or answered. So, been under a rock for a while and decided to make the jump from Windows 7 - 10.

My research tells me that MS Edge is pre built in to W10 and so decided, for the time being, to use it as my browser. I'm sure you can appreciate my immediate concern when upon using Edge for ahem 'normal' browsing, past 'private' browsing searches were being displayed right in front of me.

What I mean by the above is, Bing has a habit of displaying search history (private) by pressing just one keystroke of any letter that was originally typed in. Not very private that me thinks.

I have no option to change search provider as the option to deselect Bing is greyed out with no alternative, say Google. It's like MS is purposefully winding you up. Don't even get me started on deselecting 'auto form filling', 'suggested sites' ect as when I return into advanced settings, it's re selected itself.

What?!?

Deleting history and all that lark still continues to display it so it really does beg the question. Is MS Edge flawed or is this an isolated incident?

I am seriously considering jibbing it off and using Chrome instead. I've heard you can't even uninstall Edge as you have to edit the registry or do some magical workaround that involves taking ownership or something to that affect of a number of files associated with it.

So yeah, that's pretty much it. If anyone can shed some light on this I'd be really grateful.

Cheers.
 
Agree with your general sentiments but here's two things:

You need to actually be on the google.com webpage to be able to select it as default search provider in Edge - Advanced Settings. Try it.

Also do a Windows search for Internet Options and tweak the settings there. It's for Internet Explorer but some will have an effect on Edge while some won't.

After doing that, Edge was more bearable for me. But I still also use Firefox for some things.
 
Open Edge, go to www.google.co.uk, then press the three dots and select Settings. Now scroll down to Advanced and you'll be able to select Google as your default search engine. You can also change your start up page and add a configurable home button too. I've found Edge to be one of the easiest browsers to configure to my preferences - light years ahead of IE.

As for Edge displaying your InPrivate browsing history once you've closed the InPrivate window, it shouldn't and (on all my setups) doesn't. Just tried going InPrivate, went to a few websites, closed InPrivate and opened normal Edge and there's no sign of those pages in the history or in the suggestions when typing into the address bar. When you've encountered issues, was InPrivate still open? Or were you logging into anything in the InPrivate browser and on the normal browser that was syncing your history?
 
If you're in Private mode, it will still auto-complete from things in your history (but shouldn't be sharing cookies that were set outside of Private mode. However, sites you visit in Private mode should not be added to your browsing history.

Is it possible you visited these sites outside of Private mode at some point?

That said, if you want actual private browsing, you'd better use a VPN. Always remember...

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Even when using private mode with IE11 you will find loads of the stuff you were browsing have been saved on your PC in these folders

C:\Users\yourname\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\INetCache
 
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