I think this is fixed now. When the policy is active the current master version of Chrome will not even let you click the "delete" item in the drop down meny of a single history element and selecting items is disabled too. 

@dbeam: I am right to assume this is WAI?

Do you think it makes sense to hide the selection boxes and the delete item link when this policy is active instead of making them unclickable?

Hiding these things makes sense to me.

fwiw: I think the history page could do a much better job of showing disabled UI components.

after setting AllowDeletingBrowserHistory to true and reloading about:policy, I can see in the inspector (and by clicking) that checkboxes are disabled, but I didn't know that AT ALL before trying.  I'm colorblind, so maybe there is a difference in disabled look, but it's lost on me.  We should make it clearer or just remove the checkboxes (because the only 2 actions are CANCEL/DELETE right now).

We should also more clearly disable the action menu item "Remove this site" or just not show it.

MD downloads already hides the X to delete an item when this policy is disabled.

tl;dr - agree with tsergeant@.

Deleted: history_action_menu.png 4.3 KB

	history_action_menu.png 4.3 KB View Download

Deleted: history_checkbox.png 4.7 KB

	history_checkbox.png 4.7 KB View Download

Deleted: downloads_no_x_to_delete.png 10.0 KB

	downloads_no_x_to_delete.png 10.0 KB View Download

The following revision refers to this bug:
  https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/9fad3677dfb44803f01ad43c92b9dc1a82b40794

commit 9fad3677dfb44803f01ad43c92b9dc1a82b40794
Author: calamity <calamity@chromium.org>
Date: Thu Feb 16 03:31:31 2017

[MD History] Hide selection and deletion UI for users that can't delete history.

BUG= 687539 
CQ_INCLUDE_TRYBOTS=master.tryserver.chromium.linux:closure_compilation

Review-Url: https://codereview.chromium.org/2672723002
Cr-Commit-Position: refs/heads/master@{#450861}

[modify] https://crrev.com/9fad3677dfb44803f01ad43c92b9dc1a82b40794/chrome/browser/resources/md_history/compiled_resources2.gyp
[modify] https://crrev.com/9fad3677dfb44803f01ad43c92b9dc1a82b40794/chrome/browser/resources/md_history/history_item.html
[modify] https://crrev.com/9fad3677dfb44803f01ad43c92b9dc1a82b40794/chrome/browser/resources/md_history/history_item.js
[modify] https://crrev.com/9fad3677dfb44803f01ad43c92b9dc1a82b40794/chrome/browser/resources/md_history/history_toolbar.js
[modify] https://crrev.com/9fad3677dfb44803f01ad43c92b9dc1a82b40794/chrome/browser/resources/md_history/list_container.html
[modify] https://crrev.com/9fad3677dfb44803f01ad43c92b9dc1a82b40794/chrome/browser/resources/md_history/list_container.js
[modify] https://crrev.com/9fad3677dfb44803f01ad43c92b9dc1a82b40794/chrome/test/data/webui/md_history/history_supervised_user_test.js