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.
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.
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"
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...
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-a...
`bleachbit -c {chromium,firefox}.vacuum`
* 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 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.
I use Bookmark Checker New for this from time to time : https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bookmark-checker-n...
To easily answer this question I always use a tool like
https://windirstat.info/ (Windows) or Baobab (Linux)
[0]http://kdirstat.sourceforge.net/
[1]https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat
[2]http://www.marzocca.net/linux/baobab/
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.
Plus that script is going to do more harm than good.
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."
A paper on this Ad Injection ecosystem was published last year: http://research.google.com/pubs/pub43346.html
Deleted Comment
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...
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.
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.)
Also Chrome installs on the user $HOME, thus avoiding some of the security mechanisms that would be place, if Google would do it properly.
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.