What kind of traces are we talking about locally? Numerous if you are using the default settings of the browser, or browsers, you are using on the Internet. Probably the most known of them all are the web browser cache and cookies. The cache is filled with objects from websites that are accessed during sessions, and cookies are stored by the websites on the local system, either to track the user, save preferences or store login session information.

But there is more than that. There is the browsing history, possible downloads, browsing session information, Flash and Java plugin logs and temp files, Flash cookies, crash reports, data entered into search fields, offline cache or crash dumps. And even that may not be all.

Some web browsers offer means to clear at least some of the traces automatically. It is for instance possible to force the web browser to clear the web browsing cache, history and cookies on exit. But that’s not very efficient as it leaves lots of other traces behind.

Web Browsers Traces Eraser is a specialized tool that can be used to deal with web browsing traces of several popular browsers. The program supports the five popular web browsers Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Apple Safari, but also lesser known browsers such as Flock, K-Melon, Avant Browser, Iron, Chrome Plus or SeaMonkey.

Cleaning options are displayed for each separately in the main interface. The program activates several web browsers by default that it identifies as being installed on the system. In addition to that, it offers to clear Flash Player Shared Objects, Flash Player Sys History, Java Cache, Java Logs, Java Temp Files and several Windows operating system traces. A click on Scan does the same during a session.

The clean button spawns a suggestion to create a System Restore point before the selected locations will be cleaned of all browsing traces. That’s recommended but optional. Settings can be saved, which is fine if you do not want to remove data from a certain web browser. These settings are however not loaded by default. It is necessary to either click on the Load button to load them, or to open the program’s settings to configure the program to load the settings ini file on startup.

Web Browsers Traces Eraser is more or less a specialized version of the popular temporary file cleaner CCleaner. Its main advantage is that it supports more web browsers out of the box than CCleaner. It lacks custom locations to include portable browsers and a preview of what is going to be cleaned before it is cleaned. There is also no option to whitelist cookies and other data.

The software program is available as a portable version and installer for the Windows operating system. Users who want to give it a try can download Web Browsers Traces Eraser from the No Virus Thanks website.

Once installed it scans your computer for items in temporary folders, browser cache and recent documents for instance. Almost thirty locations, each showing the number of files and the complete size of all those files. I think it´s interesting that the program lists all three browsers that I use (opera, firefox and ie) each with separate entries for disk cache, cookies, history and more.

Cleaning is easy as well. Mark the locations that you want cleaned and select clean afterwards. If a path is cleaned it will disappear from the disk cleaner listing and reappear again if new files are discovered. Nice little tool with great impact on security.