Chrome doesn't delete old extension versions \ stacker news ~tech

I was on a mission to clean up my hard drive today, as I am close to running out of room. After lots of perusing, I discovered that Chrome had ~40GB worth of data stored for the AdBlock Pro extension alone. Turns out, as new versions of extensions are released and installed, old versions aren't deleted from your machine. And with this particular extension, there was about ~400MB per version. So I just reclaimed a ton of storage on my drive from this.

I found this blog post about this issue from 2014! It's sad that this has been an issue for at least a decade with no fixes.

On a positive note, it's cool to see how often extensions like ABP are updated and released.

I don't know if this is a Chrome issue specifically, or a general Chromium issue, so other Chromium-based browser users might also want to check it out.

101 sats \ 0 replies \ @beorange 25 Aug

Just a two small tips:

Don't use Chrome. It's the browser of an advertisement company (and it behaves like one).
Don't use Ad-block Pro/Plus, whatever. They also have some shady ties and practices.

So what's a better approach?

For 1., use Firefox, Brave, Librewolf, etc. The one you feel comfortable. For 2., use uBlock Origin. Open-source, and the true ad-blocker. I can't even imagine how someone could access the web nowadays without it.