Delete Google Chrome browsing data on exit

Google Chrome offers its users several options when it comes to clearing browsing data.

One of the quickest ways is to use the Ctlr-Shift-Del shortcut to bring up the clear browsing data menu where you can select the data types that you want to delete (Firefox users: the same shortcut is opening the browser's delete browsing data menu as well).

Besides selecting what you want to delete, you can also select from which point in time on you want the items to be cleared. Available options include to clean items from the past week, from the past hour or all items.

If you prefer to use the mouse, you can click on the wrench icon, and then on Settings > Show advanced settings > Clear Browsing Data to open the menu this way.

It is rather interesting that Chrome does not ship with options to automatically clear all browsing data on exit. While it is possible to delete all cookies and site-data, it currently does not seem possible to delete all data on exit.

You need to use browser extensions or third party programs like CCleaner to automatically delete Google Chrome browsing data. One of the extensions that you can use for that purpose is Click&Clean which offers a rich functionality.

Here is the list of data that it can clean automatically when the browser window is closed:

• Browsing history
• Download history
• Browser cache
• Cookies
• Local Storage
• SQL databases
• Indexed databases
• File system
• Application cache
• Web applications data
• Reset search engines
• Reset zoom levels
• Saved form data
• Saves passwords
• Extensions cookies
• Extensions Local Storage
• Extensions SQL databases
• Extensions indexed databases
• Extensions file system
• Google Gears data
• Reset Chrome Local State

Plus the following that are not Chrome specific:

• Recycle Bin
• Temporary files
• Recently opened files
• Flash Local Shared Objects (LSO)
• Silverlight Cookies
• Java Cache

You can furthermore select to delete the data using secure overwrites to protect the data against file recovery attempts, configure Click&Clean to run an external application like CCleaner or Eraser, and whitelist cookies and site data to block the data from being deleted with the rest of the data.

It is not really clear why Google is not integrating an option to delete all browsing data on exit in the Chrome browser.

The Click&Clean extension for the browser makes more than up for it though, and it is recommended to anyone who wants that feature to be available in the browser.

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