Chrome Cleanup Tool | Hacker News Reader

Chrome Cleanup Tool

google.com

265 pointspvinis105 comments

For Firefox users, I recently did the following: follow the instructions here http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=8494865&sid=37... and run SpeedyFox, which on Mac is I think just a SQLite cleanup tool.

But, it made a huge difference. Deleting all of my history older than six months pegged one of my CPUs and made FF unusable for about 20 minutes, but that, deleting all my cookies, clearing the recent download list, removing a couple of rarely/never used addons, and running SpeedyFox seems to have helped a lot. So speedy now.

Firefox has it's own built in cleanup tool. I used it recently when I was seeing odd behaviour and delays loading pages.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-a...

This just resets the profile. I've seen the Chrome clean up tool in action on an infected computer and it did a lot more, it actually worked like an antimalware scanner and removed many malware infections from the machine that were doing DNS hijacking and script injection.

Not sure if it's equivalent but bleachbit (a portable ccleaner like tool in python) has rules to VACUUM browsers sqlite files.

`bleachbit -c {chromium,firefox}.vacuum`

I gotta try this. Just last night I was doing some light browsing while hanging on irc and I think my Firefox crashed twice. I haven't had issues since I moved back to Firefox few months back and it started to shake my "commitment"

You can just create a new profile folder.

This is true, but it always takes me a long time to get my setup just right: bookmarks, search keywords, extensions, preferences, getting the address bar history primed...

Isn't there a way to copy a profile?

This would be great for archival - so I can search - I want to know last year when I was on Project X about some things that would be useful right now....

pretty sure the Rescue Profile thing or Reset Profile mentioned above makes a backup copy and puts it on your desktop. Its in the usual profile dir for your OS either way, ~/Library/<something> on OS X and wow it's been forever since I used windows but under your user dir.

I want a tool that cleans up my bookmarks. I'll often bookmark a page to look at it later, but then never get back to it or forget I bookmarked it. After a few years of using Chrome, I've got a crapload of bookmark bloat. Here's what I'm looking for in such a tool (I might try to build this unless there's something out there already that does this):

* Surface bookmarks I haven't visited in the past N days/months, give me the option to delete them

* Identify groups of bookmarks that are similar (share most of the URL path or one page links to the other) or duplicates.

* Suggest folders to place the bookmarks in based upon what Google knows about the websites (Sports-related, WebDev-related, etc), and/or time (I bookmarked five pages about similar topics on the same day, it's probably part of research I was doing for something)

* Remove dead links or offer to convert them to the Google-cached version

I used to do this before I found OneTab. Now "do later" bookmarks go there.

I exported my old Chrome bookmarks for reference (but very rarely actually open them), and switched to Pinboard for reference bookmarks. I still use the bookmarks bar for bookmarklets and very frequently visited sites though.

> * Remove dead links

I use Bookmark Checker New for this from time to time : https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bookmark-checker-n...

It would be nice if it could clean up the crap Chrome produces. Just few weeks ago I was wondering why my drive is so full, and yep, Chrome was almost 12GB of that. It was cache, so somewhat legitimate (unlike what they used to do - leave 20 chrome copies on your drive), but chrome couldn't clean it (clear cache did nothing). I had to delete it manually (and of course it caused some problems). Few days later I was at 10+GB mark again, Chrome not being able to clean it.

> Just few weeks ago I was wondering why my drive is so full

To easily answer this question I always use a tool like

https://windirstat.info/ (Windows) or Baobab (Linux)

For OS X, http://www.derlien.com/ is a solid alternative.

Space Gremlin is another good one for OS X. and it feels a little more "Nativey" than Disk Inventory X (which I've also used and is also good).

http://www.spacegremlinapp.com/

GrandPerspective is also good, despite its hosting.

http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/

Or DaisyDisk, I love DaisyDisk.

or OmniDiskSweeper.

https://www.omnigroup.com/more/

Alternatively for windows, SpaceSniffer is a portable single file under 1 meg and no installation is required. http://www.uderzo.it/main_products/space_sniffer/

Definitely an upgrade to the old WinDirStat.

WindirStat was based on KDirStat[0] (which apparently has been superseded by qdirstat[1], this is the first I've heard of it) for KDE. Baobab[2] is a similar tool for Gnome.

[0]http://kdirstat.sourceforge.net/

[1]https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat

[2]http://www.marzocca.net/linux/baobab/

A bit slower, but I just use totalcmd to display sizes of all direct subfolders. Check both program files' folders and then user folder (and work my way into appdata).

If you are using Windows, also consider Tronscript, which fights for the User.

https://github.com/bmrf/tron/blob/master/README.md#stage-1-t... https://www.reddit.com/r/TronScript/

It de-bloat all useless software installed by OEM, BleachBit your computer, purge telemetry which tracking users, Disinfect virus and optimize computer. Most of the strange problem will go away from my experiences.

It is one tool that I will highly recommend to someone who really want a clean computer.

This has nothing to do with what the person above was talking about. You're just using their post to advertise. It doesn't attempt to reduce Chrome's disk footprint, and they said nothing about OEM software.

Plus that script is going to do more harm than good.

I am not connect to Tronscript in anyway.

It is simply a great automatic tool that really clean up a lot of problem.

> It is simply a great automatic tool that really clean up a lot of problem.

And introduce just as many new problems...

Does ccleaner help with that stuff?

Ccleaner with Winapp2 does the job here.

I have never heard of Winapp2 -- looks really cool. Thanks for mentioning it.

http://www.winapp2.com/

is ccleaner a legitimate product? when I tried it years ago it seemed kind of shady

I've been using it for years. It is brilliant.

If I have to use a Windows machine, CCleaner is one of the first tools I install, it's fantastic. On OS X I use App Cleaner (I run it in parallel with `brew cask rm` just to be safe). PS: That's numberwang! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjOZtWZ56lc

Don’t forget to run `brew cleanup` as well.

it's one the tools they teach you in forensics course, when they speak about "nasty anti-forensics done by criminals".

Source: attended some courses ;)

Judging on the verbiage of that splash page, it sounds like this is a utility that does nothing more than reset one's settings back to normal, while deleting, or at least disabling a majority of add-ons that may be primary contributors to the crashing, erroneous start pages, and "ads you can't get rid of".

Heh, when I read it, I took it to mean they are looking for malware exe's that are lodged on your system that affect Chrome. I guess you could go either way on it, but how is this different than just doing the "Reset All Settings" function available in the Chrome settings?

Text: "This application will scan and remove software that may cause problems with Chrome, such as crashes, unusual startup pages or toolbars, unexpected ads you can't get rid of, or otherwise changing your browsing experience."

Maybe helpful for things that prevent you from even getting to Chrome's settings.

http://chrome.blogspot.com/2015/05/new-research-ad-injection... describes why such a tool must exist. AFAIUI, the cleanup tool addresses with the many Windows executables that can compromise the core Chrome experience and user profile settings in order to inject bothersome advertisements.

A paper on this Ad Injection ecosystem was published last year: http://research.google.com/pubs/pub43346.html

Interesting, I understood something completely different. I thought it would detect and remove malware installed on the user's computer that affect chrome behavior.

I've seen malware add-ons that add themselves via the Windows registry and are near impossible for a normal user to remove, I've also seen some modify internet behavior by setting malicious DNS servers via group policy. A simple reset of settings will do nothing against these threats.

Been around for a while. Works great for getting rid of malware that hijacks chrome.

Further evidence that the browser is becoming the new OS.

I don't really see how. This type of malware has been going on in browsers for a long time.

Why is this not a part of Chrome? This is starting to resemble the Norton Way(tm). For a number of years Norton have been distributing special tools to help clean up and remove their own products, making them a 100% un-user-friendly.

I might be wrong, will try to dig deeper, but to me it seems like this is for removing third party crapware that might affect your Chrome experience (toolbars, ad-injectors etc), not for removing Google's own stuff. So kind of makes sense to be an optional standalone tool.

"For Windows" no surprises there.

Because this tool is to get rid of malware that installed toolbars or injects ads. That's pretty much a Windows exclusive 'feature' at the moment.

Nonsense. The Chrome Web Store is full of shady new tab pages and ad injectors. Google is just now finally trying to police it.

Utterly anecdotal, but I have never personally experienced this kind of thing on OSX since switching ~ 4 years ago. At that time, I found Windows PC essentially unusable because of the likelihood of infection which only seemed to increase when using the very tools that advertised themselves as tackling the problem. Of course, I mean the 'reputable' ones like symantec, mcafee, and avg.

Chrome app/extension malware can be handled from within Chrome itself, though. You only need a separate tool for OS-level malware.

Fun fact, third party apps can't modify Chrome on Windows. If any third party app injects a Chrome extension into Chrome or alters a single Chrome setting... even just the homepage... Chrome will delete all extensions, all extension settings, reset the homepage to default, and reset the search engine to Google on next launch. A big downside is that your Chrome settings are basically tied to a specific PC, so forget about moving them to a new PC unless you sign in and sync to Google.

> Fun fact, third party apps can't modify Chrome on Windows.

AVG managed to. [1]

> When a user installs AVG AntiVirus, a Chrome extension called "AVG Web TuneUp" with extension id chfdnecihphmhljaaejmgoiahnihplgn is force-installed. I can see from the webstore statistics it has nearly 9 million active Chrome users.

> This extension adds numerous JavaScript API's to chrome, apparently so that they can hijack search settings and the new tab page. The installation process is quite complicated so that they can bypass the chrome malware checks, which specifically tries to stop abuse of the extension API.

[1] https://code.google.com/p/google-security-research/issues/de...

Related fun fact: AVG tries to install Chrome as bundleware by tricking the user using dark patterns as part of upgrades and is paid by Google to do so.

Addendum: In checking, I confirmed AntiVir and Avast both trick users into installing Chrome as I have screenshots of it (as well as Java, Adobe Flash, etc). I recall AVG doing it as well but don't have the associated screenshots.

> A big downside is that your Chrome settings are basically tied to a specific PC, so forget about moving them to a new PC unless you sign in and sync to Google.

Even then. I'm not sure why extension config-data isn't transparently replicated between hosts, but it's a really noticeable problem when you have an extension installed that's as complex as XKit or RES. Even for uBlock, you have to copy-and-paste your whitelist rules between hosts, rather than having them just follow you around.

Chrome allows extensions to have automatically synchronized settings. Blame the extension if it doesn't use the feature.

That does surprise me. Chrome is a cross-OS application, it runs on Windows/Mac/Linux, right? And things like extensions are all internal to the browser. Why is a scanner for bad settings and bad extensions bound to a single OS?

Chrome provides hooks to allow Windows to force extensions into it through Group Policy et al. Good for corporate IT, bad for protecting yourself against malware.

The key insight is that Chrome itself is programmed to have quite-limited permissions—it not only heavily sandboxes itself, but it also does what it can to avoid requesting any powers from the OS that could be used to do damage in the first place, if one were to break out of the sandbox. (This also has the side-benefit that Chrome doesn't need any of those "scary" UAC elevation prompts during installation, which probably helps their funnel to an extent.)

This means that Chrome actually doesn't have any of the permissions required to weed out the GPOs responsible for feeding it malware extensions. Even if the Chrome process wanted to reach out and blow them away, it couldn't. So they created this separate program, that does do "scary" UAC-elevation things, to help out.

(What they could have done is package this program into the Windows Chrome install, make it headless, and make a button in the Chrome settings that would spawn it and then interact with it over IPC, displaying the UI on the Chrome side. They could have, further, made it just-in-time download the component—as, IIRC, Firefox does with its Hello component—which would have eliminated any install-time size overhead to this approach.)

It's technically possible for Chrome to have this problem on other operating systems as well, but in practice their telemetry shows the vast majority of malware which installs things into Chrome is on Windows.

Of course, it is after all the number one desktop platform, regardless of several "Year of desktop on" attempts.

Also Chrome installs on the user $HOME, thus avoiding some of the security mechanisms that would be place, if Google would do it properly.

Chrome has installed the Program Files like a "good" application for a while now. It did used to install to AppData\Local which was "bad" as yes it did skirt around some security things at the time.

Eh... https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/m-TgJo...

Whats joke in that. Android platform has more such things than Windows currently

Android's crapware problem is manageable. Everything belongs to an app, apps can be uninstalled and then the crap is gone.

The problem on windows is the insidious third-party apps that inject their extensions into chrome and re-create them when you try to remove them so the only way to actually get rid of them is a specialized tool.

Not true about removable memory.

I think it may be that Chrome resource problems, as well as crashes are more traditionally seen on the Mac. Of course, I could be biased with that conjecture.

The joke is that Windows doesn't do self-cleaning like the Mac does and Windows machines often come installed with bloatware that is frequently harmful to the correct functioning of a personal computer.

Also Macs don't get viruses as frequently. I'm not saying they're less susceptible but it does happen less often.

(see: any recent COTS Windows PC, especially Lenovo)

so it's not Windows that's bloated. It's the Manufacturers or your product is bloated. No one stops you from installing clean Windows OS without bloatware. Can you tell me one single product in Apple which is sold by other than Apple.

Seems like you are comparing Oranges n Apples.

> No one stops you from installing clean Windows OS without bloatware.

Except if your BIOS has WPBT which provides for installing such bloatware. Like Lenovo has done.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150812/11395231925/lenov...

Yes well Microsoft allowed that fraud to be perpetuated on the user and has done so for a very long time. It's actively detrimental to the user experience, and for the most part, they know it. But due to commoditization their manufacturers are dependent on it. They aren't though, any PC you buy in a Microsoft store comes bloat free.

>No one stops you from installing clean Windows OS without bloatware.

Ah sure, that's every average PC user's first step after unboxing their shiny new laptop. Wipe it with DBAN and do a fresh install.

Just kidding, it's pretty obviously not. Most people don't even know what wiping a computer entails, or how to do it, or that it would actually get rid of the bloat. These things seem simple to us but most people don't understand the first thing about computers.

No one stops you from buying a Mac because you're sick of dealing with bloatware either. Just sayin'.

>Can you tell me one single product in Apple which is sold by other than Apple.

No clue what you're trying to say there.

We all buy computers and re-install the OS immediately but your mom doesn't, and neither does mine. That's the problem.

Agree that. Its consumer problem. They always have choice to buy something and use.

Wiping the OS is an extreme measure only employed by power users. It's not their fault that it's a required step before using a new PC.

Windows defender says - Malware Detected and Download failed. Ouch!!

Probably because the tool contains definitions of the malware it's trying to get rid of.

That's odd. The tool downloaded and ran just fine for me. Even manually scanning with Windows Defender results in nothing. I'm using Windows 10, version 1511. My virus & spyware definitions are up to date.

Does anyone else get a "webpage screenshot - this extension has been automatically disabled" pop up every time they start chrome on OSX?

I get that it's now spyware, but just remove the extension already, not just disabling it each time. It doesn't show in chrome://extensions either.

I found a number of threads about this, many in the Google Support forums. The best solution I could find is:

    * Disconnect your Google profile from Chrome.
    * Close Chrome
    * Re-open Chrome
    * View chrome:extensions. You should see it there. You can delete it.
    * Reconnect your Google profile

Let me know if that works, and I'll try to update our docs on it.

You may have something installed on your computer which keeps on reinstalling it into Chrome.

consider running adware medic to attempt to remove it.

Finally! We get lots of complaints from out customers about these ads. Some are not tech savvy enough to remove malware and add-ons. We had to help them in removing these. Ideal solution would be Google alerting the users and removing these malware after getting users' permission.

Does it remove the Google app that always runs even when your are not using Chrome?

You know that you can just turn that off in the settings, right?

I don't think that this option was available when I tried Chrome and Picasa years ago but it should default to off...

I was expecting a OS X app to remove all the old versions of Chrome that get left inside the application package folder after each evergreen update.

NFI why the updater doesn't clean out versions that are > than, say, 3mths old.

On OS X, Chrome keeps the last two versions around. If you have more old versions, it's likely a bug or a problem with permissions. My mother's mac had the same issue as you. After I deleted Chrome.app and downloaded a fresh copy from Google, it never returned.

Got rid of something called Conduit Toolbar for me. Although I politely declined it's offer of disabling all my extensions and resetting everything back to default.

I will be sending this to everyone I've had to help "remove viruses" from their computer in the last two years. This tool is a godsend.

Chrome installs in Application Data, which doesn't require admin privileges to modify. That probably makes it an easy target for malware.

It would be nice if the title contains "for Windows" as I couldn't find an option for Mac/Linux anywhere.

99% of the kinds of malware that would cause these issues won't target Mac/Linux

Beware as it tries to reset your preferences to default.

All this trouble to get rid of the Ask.com toolbar. ;)

Why Can't Google just build that into Chrome?

I shall try this!

windows only? exe file

Ran it, said it found nothing. But now all of a sudden I'm getting some sort of ad e-mails in my gmail inbox?

Oh, and I can no longer send tweets in Tweetdeck. Good times.

Why is this necessary? Google already disabled third party extensions.

My PC was infected with the Snapdo adware...... this thing did not help. I recommend Malwarebytes.

I'm surprised when people recommend clean-up tools, rather than wiping and reinstalling.

It's easy to understand if you consider time and effort. Time and effort installing and running something recommended (e.g. Google's tool) versus time and effort wiping and reinstalling.

Now, the first install and run task may or may not work. If it does, horray for efficient choices. If it doesn't then the user can wipe and reinstall.

Has anyone actually tried it (I haven't)? Sounds like another step against malware that targets Chrome. It's nice to know that Google cares about safety and all, but what do they gain financially?

They gain confidence from their users that Chrome is a safe and secure browser. I don't understand why this should be confusing.

The article does a good job of explaining this, I thought. In addition to their reputation as a browser maker, they have the integrity of their ad network to maintain.

Wins all around, if you ask me.

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