More recent versions of the Google Chrome browser have a bug that prevents some users from deleting their browsing history.
After the release of Chrome 72 in January, Google started monitoring issues and noticed a sudden increase in the number of issues related to the browsing data clearing. Many users reported that the feature didn’t work as intended. After initiating the clearing process, it would run endlessly without an option for users to terminate the process.
Privacy is a concerning matter for many internet users. Many people do not like to leave their browsing history to public scrutiny. All modern browsers allow users to clean the browsing history which contains several types of data either received from the internet or created by the browser itself. Downloaded files are temporarily stored on your PC. Cookies and the browser cache also contain information that some users would like to keep private.
So far, only users of Windows and OSX were affected by these issues. The company acknowledged the issue and started working on a fix. The bug is related to SessionStorage that does not finish its deletion for no apparent reason. Engineers detected the issue at the beginning of May and have been working on a stable solution ever since. Note that the latest release of the browser is Chrome 74 released in April. It was confirmed that the bug persisted in Chrome 74.
What to do if you have to deal with the bug?
While Google engineers are working on a solution, you can use third-party apps to clean the cache. There are programs like BleachBit that you can get for free. It allows users to delete cookies, history, passwords and downloaded temporary files. You can also use CleanCC, SD Maid, and other similar third-party apps.
Windows users can remove unwanted files manually. You will have to navigate through your files on the hard drive. Go to “Users\User\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Cache” (replace “user” with the name of Windows user and “Default” if you need to remove cache data of a specific Chrome user) and delete all files in the directory.
The fix most likely will be delivered with the next Chrome update. Chrome Canary users already enjoy the fix, but users of stable versions will have to wait.
