Clear History & Close

⚠️ Alpha — cake is not cooked yet. This extension has not been published to the Chrome Web Store. APIs and UI may change. File bugs and feedback under Issues. Release history in CHANGELOG.md.

A minimal Chrome extension (Manifest V3) that wipes your browsing history, cache, cookies, downloads, hosted-app data, site settings, and local site data in one click — then closes Chrome. Saved passwords and form-autofill data are kept.

Features

• One-click Clear & Close — wipes everything (except passwords & form data) and exits Chrome.
• Auto-Clear on Close — clears when the last Chrome window is closed. Single tabs and non-final windows do not trigger a clear; only the final window-removal does. Because Manifest V3 service workers can't reliably finish large I/O during Chrome shutdown, every Chrome startup with mode=close runs a guaranteed clear (no flag dependency — drops if Chrome was running in background or the close handler missed). A best-effort clear also fires at close-time; if it completes, fine, but the design doesn't depend on it. Net behavior: data is always gone, just possibly at next launch instead of at close.
• Auto-Clear When Idle — clears after 5 minutes of inactivity using the chrome.idle API.
• Permissions requested at install time so everything works immediately.

What gets cleared

Item	Cleared?
Browsing history	✔
Download history	✔
Cookies & other site data	✔
Hosted app data (cookies / storage of apps installed from chrome://apps)	✔
Cached images & files	✔
IndexedDB & Cache Storage	✔
Local & session storage	✔
Service workers & FileSystem	✔
Site Settings (notification, location, camera, popup, etc. exceptions)	✔
Saved passwords	✖ kept
Autofill / form data	✖ kept

Install (developer / side-load)

Easiest — download the zip from a Release:

1. Go to the Releases page and grab the clear-history-and-close-v*.zip from the latest tag.
2. Unzip it somewhere you'll keep (Chrome reads the extension straight from disk; don't put it under Downloads or %TEMP%).
3. Follow INSTALL.md (also bundled inside the zip).

From source:

1. git clone this repo.
2. Open chrome://extensions.
3. Enable Developer mode (top right).
4. Click Load unpacked and select the project folder.

To build a fresh zip yourself:

python tools/build-package.py

That writes dist/clear-history-and-close-v<version>.zip from the current manifest.json version.

Install (Chrome Web Store)

Coming soon. See docs/CHROME_STORE.md for the publish checklist.

How it works

• manifest.json — MV3 manifest, declares browsingData, contentSettings, cookies, storage, idle, alarms and <all_urls> host permission.
• popup.html / popup.css / popup.js — the popup UI (Clear & Close button and auto-mode toggle).
• background.js — service worker: listens for window-close and idle events, handles messages from the popup, persists settings via chrome.storage.sync.
• icons/ — 16 / 32 / 48 / 128 px PNGs.
• tools/generate_icons.py — regenerate icons (requires Pillow).

Permissions explained

Permission	Why
browsingData	Deleting cookies, cache, history, downloads, site storage (bulk path).
cookies + <all_urls> host permission	Belt-and-suspenders: enumerate every cookie via chrome.cookies.getAll({}) and remove individually, in case the bulk browsingData path silently misses any. No web pages are read; only the cookie store is touched.
contentSettings	Resetting per-site permission grants (notifications, location, camera) and other site-settings exceptions — Chrome's "Site Settings" bucket.
storage	Remembering your auto-clear mode across sessions.
idle	Detecting when Chrome has been inactive for 5 minutes.
alarms	One-time "welcome" badge cleanup after install.

The <all_urls> host permission is required by chrome.cookies.remove; the extension does not read or modify webpage content (no content scripts declared). No network requests are made; nothing is uploaded.

Development

# Regenerate icons after editing the generator
python -m pip install Pillow
python tools/generate_icons.py

Roadmap

Pre-1.0 (things to finish before Chrome Web Store submission):

• Dogfood auto-clear on close & idle across multi-window sessions
• Options page for configurable idle timeout (currently hardcoded at 5 min)
• Optional whitelist — domains whose cookies survive a clear
• Keyboard shortcut (e.g. Ctrl+Shift+Del-and-close)
• Localization (English only for now)
• Store listing: screenshots, promo tile, privacy-policy hosting
• First-install onboarding tab explaining what the toggle does

Contributing

Happy to take PRs or issues. This is alpha — small, targeted patches are the easiest to land. For bigger changes, open an issue first so we can sync on scope.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

Author

Dan Oxender <dan.oxender@comtekglobal.com>