Google Chrome 74 Can’t Delete Browsing History - Quick Workaround

[The AchieVer]

Google Chrome 74 Can’t Delete Browsing History - Quick Workaround 

 

Google Chrome 74 is one of the most controversial updates for the browser in a long time, especially on Windows 10.

This new version brought a highly-anticipated feature to users of Microsoft’s latest operating system, as it officially enabled the dark theme for everyone (after previously been tested in the Canary and beta builds).

While the dark mode was supposed to align with the visual settings in Windows 10 and only show up when the OS itself was set to the dark theme, users are not provided with a toggle to enable or disable this visual style according to their preferences. So if they want to use the dark theme in Windows 10 with the light theme in Chrome, that’s not possible unless they turn to more complex tricks.

In addition to this controversy, Google Chrome 74 also comes with a bug that’s not yet widespread, but which appears to be hitting an increasing number of computers. This is according to Googlers themselves, who confirmed the issue affects mostly Windows, but also exists on Mac.

The bug in question breaks down the browsing history cleaner, with users revealing that the process either fails or freezes before reaching completion.

In other words, beginning with Chrome 74, it might be impossible to clean browsing history using the built-in tools in the browser.
 

 

 

The issue was first reported in early February in Google Chrome 72, and by the looks of things, the number of people complaining about it increased once Chrome 74 went live.

“Confirming that we're seeing another spike on M74 stable with reports of users being unable to clear browsing history (it looks more cache than specifically cookies). Reports are 91% Windows, but we're seeing reports from Mac as well,” a Chrome engineer confirmed on April 29.

“It looks like a huge increase in feedback for M74. I looked into this today and could trigger it randomly in stable once. Tracing showed that something in StoragePartition was blocking but we don't have more debug info there,” another engineer added as the team looked into the issue.

Reproducing the issue depends on a series of factors, and while some users are indeed unable to delete browsing history, others claim everything’s working just fine. In most cases, cleaning cache is the feature that’s broken down, and fortunately, there’s a very easy way to do the whole thing manually until Google comes up with a fix.

And it all comes down to removing the cache files on your own from the location where Google Chrome stores them on your computer. This location is the following:

C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default

What you need to do is replace the username tag in this path with your own username. If you do everything correctly, you should then see all cache files that Chrome stores on the device, so press CTRL + A to select them all and instantly clean everything.
 

 

 

As an alternative, you can turn to secure cleaning apps, and there are a lot of them that can help you with Google Chrome data, but if you just want to delete the cache, the manual workaround is the one that doesn’t require any other steps.

Google has already developed a fix, and it was included in the most recent Canary build shipped to testers. The company hasn’t provided an ETA as to when we should expect the patch to land for production devices, but it should go live anytime soon. Most likely, Google won’t wait until the next stable version lands on June 4 and release the fix as part of another Chrome 74 update in the coming days.

 

 

 

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