Deleting browser data upon exit

Chrome may no longer be deleting data when you close the browser

I’m sure that there used to be a setting in Chrome that was relatively easy to find for deleting browser data when closing the browser.

Saluting road sweeper — It used to be easy to clean up the rubbish!

It’s just taken me fifteen minutes to find where they’ve now buried this setting. If you are privacy-conscious and want to make sure that you are not carrying data from session to session then here is what you must now do. For the sake of completeness, this is the full list of steps that finally got me there:

Click on the three dots at the top right of the Chrome browser window.
Click on “Settings”
From the lefthand menu, click on “Privacy and security”
Click on the item headed “Site settings”
Scroll down the the section headed “Content” and click on “Additional content settings”
Scroll down to the last item on the list (“On-device site data”) and click on it
Under the section headed “Default behavior” (sic), select the second of the three options – “Delete data sites have saved to your device when you close all windows”. When they say “all windows”, they actually mean “all Chrome windows” (I hope!)

Anyone would think they don’t really want you to find this.

The quicker way to change these settings

Having sussed it out by trying almost every option in Chrome, I am now happy to pass on the much quicker way for you to get to “On-device site data”. Simply go to the Chrome address bar and enter:

chrome://settings/content/siteData (followed by <enter> of course).

Here’s the equally quick way to the relevant setting for deleting browser data in other products. Again, just type the address into the address bar and press <enter>:

Firefox

about:preferences#privacy (and then enter a tick against “Delete cookies and site data when Firefox is closed”)

Edge

edge://settings/clearBrowsingDataOnClose (and then choose your options)

With all three of the above browsers, you can just copy the address (in bold above) and paste it into your browser’s address bar.

DuckDuckGo

Just click the “fire” icon near the top right of the browser window and click the “clear” button to close all open tabs and clear data

Safari (on a Mac)

I could not find a way of automatically removing all site data when closing Safari.

By the way, don’t install Safari on a Windows computer as it will be a very old verson that is probably not secure from all modern threats.

A slight word of warning: If you delete your browsing data then you will almost certainly be logged out of all websites (but some browsers allow you to exclude some websites from having data cleared). So, you will need to know your username and password to log back into those sites.

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Image by luis_molinero on Freepik