This prompt since then has been removed by Mozilla. Firefox users who want to re-enable the prompt in the Firefox browser can install the AskForSanitize add-on to do that. The add-on basically displays the clear recent history window whenever the user closes the browser.

Here it is then possible to clear everything or only select data sets. Users can for instance delete the cache, browsing and download history or site preferences in the dialog. The time range to clear pulldown menu can be used to delete data that is older than the selected time range.

The Firefox extension ships with a toolbar button that triggers the delete browsing data prompt on mouse click. It is not added automatically to a toolbar, which means that users need to place it there manually (by right-clicking a toolbar, selecting customize and dragging and dropping the button to the desired location on a Firefox toolbar).

One question that may come up is this: Why would anyone want to display the delete browsing history window on exit if it can be configured to run on exit automatically?

The core reason here obviously would be if the data only needs to be deleted at times and not on all exits of the browser. The automation here is a more comfortable than triggering the deletion dialog manually whenever it is needed.

Which leads directly to the following question: How often do you clear your browsing data?

The cache display on the internal Firefox page is not comfortable to work with. All entries are lumped together on one large page, and while they provide basic information like item size, date and url, they lack manageability. There are no sorting options and no options to search the cached items, other than pressing Ctrl-f to utilize Firefox’s page search.

The default cache page has another weakness. It cannot be used to save files to the local hard drive.

Enter Cache Viewer Fx5, based on the original and discontinued Cache Viewer add-on.

Firefox users can access the extension’s interface with a click on Tools > Cache Viewer or with the shortcut Ctrl-Shift-C.

The interface lists all cache items, regardless of location, in the lower half of the interface. Each item is listed with its key, size, mime type, device and the date the data was fetched. All columns are sortable to find specific items fast, for instance all images that have been loaded into the cache or all files from a specific domain.

A right-click on a single item or multiple items opens a context menu with options to save the selection to the local hard drive, to delete the items or to open them in the default web browser.

The footer bar displays the number of memory and disk cache entries, and a reload button to quickly reload the cache.

The upper half of the screen contains an image preview area on the left and detailed information about the selected file on the right. This includes the data that is shown in the list of cached items plus information like the server and request method, expiration time (great for webmasters to check the caching directives of their websites) or the ETAG code.

CacheViewer Fx5 adds much needed features to the Firefox web browser, specifically the ability to search, sort and save cache entries need to be mentioned.

Firefox users can install the add-on from the official Mozilla Firefox website. The add-on is compatible with all versions of the Firefox browser from 4 on.

Before we start with explanations on how to clear a browser cache, we are going to look at the cache briefly. What is it? Why is it there in first place? The cache is a temporary storage on your computer. It is usually located on a hard drive but can be moved freely around, for instance to removable drives or even to the RAM. Page elements are stored in the cache whenever you visit a website. This is done to speed up the loading times on your next visit, or if you navigate to another page on the website.

A basic example. Say you view ten pages on Ghacks. Instead of having to download the static Ghacks logo ten times you only download it once from the server. The logo is loaded from cache when you open the other nine pages of the website. This saves bandwidth and connections to the server which speeds up the display of the website in the web browser.

The cache can be the source of problems as well. This is for instance the case if I change the Ghacks logo after it has been stored in your cache. Your browser may display the old logo even though a new one has been uploaded to the site. While it is usually not a problem for logos and such, it could very well be problematic if you get a “site maintenance” information which does not go away, even if your friends are telling you that they can access the site again.

That’s why it is important to know how to clear the browser cache. Unfortunately, it is a different procedure with every Internet browser. This guide covers the five popular browsers Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera and Safari.

How To Clear A Browser Cache

Internet Explorer 8, 9 and newer

• Click Tools > Safety > Delete Browsing History
• Or, press Ctrl-Shift-Del
• Or, click Tools > Internet Options > Delete
• Or, open Start Menu, click Control Panel, select Internet Options > Delete

Make sure Temporary Internet Files is selected. A click on Delete clears the browser cache in Internet Explorer.

Mozilla Firefox 3.5, 4 and newer

• Click Tools > Options > Advanced > Network > Clear Now
• Or click Firefox > History > Clear Recent History
• Or, press Ctrl-Shift-Del

Make sure Cache is selected in the options. It may also be switch the time range to everything to make sure that everything that is currently stored in the cache gets deleted.

Opera

• Click Menu > Settings > Clear Private Data

Make sure Delete Entire Cache is selected in the options before you click on the Delete button.

Google Chrome

• Click Wrench > Tools > Clear Browsing Data
• Or, press Ctrl-Shift-Del
• Or, load chrome://settings/advanced and click on Clear browsing data

Make sure empty the cache is selected before you click on the clear browsing data button.

Safari

• Click Safari > Empty Cache

Clearing the browser cache manually, Cache Locations

You can also clear the browser cache manually. It is usually not necessary but handy to know anyway.

Internet Explorer

• Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files
• Windows 7, Vista: C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files

Mozilla Firefox

• Windows XP: C:\Document and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\code.default\Cache
• Windows 7, Vista: C:\Users\username\AppData\ Local\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\code.default\Cache
• Linux: /.mozilla/firefox/.default/Cache/
• Mac: ~/Users/username/Library/Caches/Firefox/
  Profiles/code.default/Cache

Google Chrome

• Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\
• Windows 7, Vista: C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Cache
• Linux: ~/.cache/google-chrome
• Mac: ~/Library/Caches/Google/Chrome

Opera

• Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Opera\Opera
• Windows Vista, 7: c:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Opera\Opera\application_cache\
• Mac: Check Menu > Help > About Opera.
• Linux: Check Menu > Help > About Opera.

Safari

• Windows XP: c:\Document and Settings\username\Application Data\Apple Computer\Safari
• Windows Vista, 7: C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Apple Computer\Safari
• Mac: ~/Library/Caches/Safari/

MozillaCacheView is a portable Nirsoft application that provides a better Firefox cache management solution. The free application lists all cache contents in its interface on startup. Each cache item is listed with its file name, content type, url, file size, modification dates and several other parameters.

The listing can be sorted easily by any parameter offered, which makes it more comfortable to sort by file type, size or originating url.

Users can also filter by website to only display cache files originating from one or multiple websites. The program offers additional filters to filter by specific file groups like video, audio or text files. Files can be opened in a web browser or saved to another location.

An option is provided for Firefox users to select another cache directory which comes in handy if a portable version of Firefox is installed. The software comes with the usual options to export information to HTML files.

MozillaCacheView’s biggest advantage over the default cache viewing options are abilities to filter results. The portable software is available for download at the Nirsoft website.

The Firefox add-on Cache Viewer offers a third option. It is basically a gui frontend for the browser cache viewer. Its advantage over the two original solutions to view the cache are numerous. This includes a visual preview of the cached item which is extremely helpful to identify images that have been placed in the cache.

It is possible to sort by url, size, mime type, cache location or date. Another handy option is the ability to use the search form to locate specific files or file types.

Additional information about a selected cache item are displayed next to the visual preview area including the expiration date and connection headers. A right-click on one or multiple images will open a context menu with options to save the selected items to the local hard drive, to delete them or to open them in the web browser.

Cache Viewer is available for Firefox 3 and can be downloaded from the Mozilla website.

The add-on will add a Cache Search option to the Firefox Tools menu. It will load a new window that contains a search form on top and two windows below which display the files that are found that include the search phrase and the source code of the page if one is selected.

Each page that has been found to contain the search phrase in the Firefox cache is displayed with information like its size, the times the search phrase was found in the file, the mime type, character and content encoding. Once a file has been selected the source code will be displayed in the second window. It will immediately jump to the first hit in the source code and highlight it so that it is easier to analyze it.

There are Next and Previous buttons that work in the second window that will jump forward and backward in the source code to highlight all the different hits in the source code.

The main reason for moving the Firefox disk cache is therefor performance. Security could be another reason. The disk cache could for instance be moved to an encrypted part of the hard drive, a removable drive or ram disk.

The location of the the Firefox disk cache cannot be changed in the Firefox settings. The only way is to add a new parameter in the about:config dialog to change the location of the Firefox disk cache.

Type about:config in the Firefox address bar:

Right-click and select New > String from the menu. Enter browser.cache.disk.parent_directory as the preference name and the new path to the cache location, for example d:\temp

Opera users can practically do the same by typing in opera:config#UserPrefs|CacheDirectory4 and changing the preference there.

Internet Explorer users can simply change the location in the Tools > Internet Options by clicking on the Settings button under Browsing History.

CCleaner is also the requirement obviously for anyone who wants to use Click&Clean since it won’t do anything if CCleaner is not installed on the computer system. Besides placing a link in the Quick Launch Bar Click&Clean adds buttons to the web browsers Internet Explorer and Firefox which can also be used to quickly clean the system using CCleaner.

The advantage of using Click&Clean is minimal and probably only useful for optimizers and users who run CCleaner several times during a session and do not want to click more than once. Everyone else is better off using CCleaner independently.

Cache Status is a Firefox add-on that can clear the RAM and Disk Cache of Firefox automatically when it reaches a defined number. The add-on is not yet compatible with Firefox 3 right away but it works flawlessly if the install.rdf file is alterered that comes with the installation package.

To do that you need to download the Firefox extension from this link by right-clicking on the button and saving it to your hard disk. Now open the downloaded file with an unpacker like Winzip, Winrar or 7-Zip and extract the install.rdf file from the package.

Open install.rdf in a text editor and search for the line that begins with . Replace the complete line with the following line 3.0 and save the file. Now add the file to the installation package again and double-click it after that to start the installation.

The add-on will display the RAM usage of Firefox 3 in the status bar and it is possible to clear the RAM manually by right-clicking those information. If you want the RAM and Disk cache to be automatically cleaned you need to open the options of the add-on under Tools > Add-ons and click on the Options button of that add-on.

Just check the automatically clear .. options and define a percentage for each value when the automatically cleaning should kick in.

Cache Viewer displays more information about the files cached and even previews them in a small window. Let us say you viewed some nice flash animations or listened to several mp3 files on some websites. It’s pretty time consuming to find out which files you need, unless you would be using cache viewer. You can sort all files in the cache by size (and other parameters) and flip through them until you find the ones that you want.

The extension offers some filters as well, you can filter parts of the file name or url to find files from a certain url for instance. It can run in it’s own window or in a tab.

The preview window is not limited to image files it is also able to display most flash files and other types of files as well.