When your computer is getting full, BleachBit quickly frees disk space. When your information is only your business, BleachBit guards your privacy. With BleachBit you can free cache, delete cookies, clear Internet history, shred temporary files, delete logs, and discard junk you didn"t know was there.
Designed for Linux and Windows systems, it wipes clean thousands of applications including Firefox, Internet Explorer, Adobe Flash, Google Chrome, Opera, Safari, and more. Beyond simply deleting files, BleachBit includes advanced features such as shredding files to prevent recovery, wiping free disk space to hide traces of files deleted by other applications, and vacuuming Firefox to make it faster. Better than free, BleachBit is open source.
BleachBit has many useful features:
- Delete your private files so completely that "even God can"t read them" according to South Carolina Representative Trey Gowdy.
- Simple operation: read the descriptions, check the boxes you want, click preview, and click delete.
- Multi-platform: Linux and Windows
- Free of charge and no money trail
- Free to share, learn, and modify (open source)
- No adware, spyware, malware, browser toolbars, or "value-added software"
- Translated to 64 languages besides American English
- Shred files to hide their contents and prevent data recovery
- Shred any file (such as a spreadsheet on your desktop)
- Overwrite free disk space to hide previously deleted files
- Portable app for Windows: run without installation
- Command line interface for scripting and automation
- CleanerML allows anyone to write a new cleaner using XML
- Automatically import and update winapp2.ini cleaner files (a separate download) giving Windows users access to 2500+ additional cleaners
- Frequent software updates with new features
Going beyond standard deletion of files, BleachBit has several advanced cleaners:
- Clear the memory and swap on Linux
- Delete broken shortcuts on Linux
- Delete the Firefox URL history without deleting the whole file—with optional shredding
- Delete Linux localizations: delete languages you don"t use. More powerful than localepurge and available on more Linux distributions.
- Clean APT for Debian, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and Linux Mint
- Find widely-scattered junk such as Thumbs.db and .DS_Store files.
- Execute yum clean for CentOS, Fedora, and Red Hat to remove cached package data
- Delete Windows registry keys—often where MRU (most recently used) lists are stored
- Delete the OpenOffice.org recent documents list without deleting the whole Common.xcu file
- Overwrite free disk space to hide previously files
- Vacuum Firefox, Google Chrome, Liferea, Thunderbird, and Yum databases: shrink files without removing data to save space and improve speed
- Surgically remove private information from .ini and JSON configuration files and SQLite3 databases without deleting the whole file
- Overwrite data in SQLite3 before deleting it to prevent recovery (optional)
BleachBit 2.2 changelog:
- To shred paths from the clipboard, open your operating system"s file browser, and copy some files to the clipboard. In BleachBit, click File - Shred Paths from Clipboard. Unlike drag-and-drop, this still works on Windows when running as administrator.
- Major cleaning improvements for Google Chrome, Chromium, and Firefox.
- Clean modern versions of Opera based on Chromium.
- Wipe free space from the command line with the new command --wipe-free-space (idea from Thomas).
- Improve startup time of application. On some systems, it can be significant.
- Increase resolution of application icon (thanks to totalCaesar659).
- Add cleaner for Waterfox (thanks to danielk43).
- Clean more of aMule (thanks to Pere Orga).
- Fix: deep scan crashed when encountering paths with special characters (reported by thecsw).
Specific to Linux
- Add packages for Fedora 28, Ubuntu 18.04, and Ubuntu 18.10.
- Improve AppData registration (thanks to Harald H).
- Clean more localizations (thanks to Tristan Stenner).
- Fix: notifications on Gnome (thanks to Djaler).
- Fix: percent symbol was not allowed in whitelist path (reported by bbusr).
- Fix: memory could not be cleaned when swap was larger than 16 GiB (reported by apd_1985).
- Fix: run BleachBit without X display, such as in cron (reported by isleno).
Windows
- Add option to install for the current user or all users.
- Clean SmartFTP (thanks to Mat Berchtold).
- Clean WordWheelQuery under Windows Explorer (thanks to Michael Ziminsky).
- Add Winapp2.ini support for DetectOS= when minimum and maximum versions are used together.
- Improve support for multiple Detect= and DetectFile= used in Winapp2.ini.
- Improve support for high numbers of ExcludeKey#= used in Winapp2.ini.
- Add support for SpecialDetect= used in Winapp2.ini (reported by bsodx2).
- Add environment variable %cd% for use in custom cleaners (idea thanks to RaiKoHoff).
- Clean cache in Windows Media Player (idea thanks to Tobias B. Besemer).
- Clean more MRU in TeamViewer (idea thanks to Tobias B. Besemer).
- Clean Midnight Commander on Windows (idea thanks to Tobias B. Besemer).
- Update embedded SQLite.
- Fix: no longer follow symlinks in the Recycle Bin (idea thanks to Glashkoff).
- Fix: ampersand can now be used in Winapp2.ini (reported by BleachThemAll).
- Fix: selecting many paths to clean caused a crash (reported by SpyTec).
- Fix: files on a network filesystem were not shredded (reported by o8k57).
- Fix: DatabaseError when cleaning Google Chrome.
- Fix: encoding error in exception logging (reported by BleachThemAll).
More
- Do you have Bitcoins? You can now donate crypocurrency (idea from spiritglove).
- Do you use PGP? You can now verify the BleachBit keys on keybase.io (idea from ofereitan).
- Improve support for FreeBSD and OpenBSD (thanks to luoliyan).
- Add and improve many cleaners in the CleanerML repository, which is a separate download from BleachBit. (Special thanks to Tobias B. Besemer for the most contributions.)
- Set the web site bleachbit.org to use HSTS for increased security.
Developers
- Move the Firefox cleaning rules from Python code to CleanerML to make it easier for people to contribute without knowing how to write Python code.
- Add powerful multi-value variable system to CleanerML. This makes it easier to write, maintain, and verify cleaners. It also makes it easier to share cleaning rules across operating systems and for similar applications, such as Google Chrome and Chromium. See the documentation.
- Add os attribute to the running, value, and action elements in CleanerML to limit by operating system (suggesed by cfoellmann).
What"s next after BleachBit 2.2? The first priority is to update GTK+ version 2 to 3, finishing the hard work by Maël Lavault and Tristan Stenner. Sorry it has taken so long. The second priority will be to update Python 2.7 to Python 3. Once complete, GTK+ 2 and Python 2 will no longer be supported, and the transition will drop support for older platforms, including Windows XP.
Download: BleachBit 2.2 | 8.9 MB (Open Source)
Download: Portable BleachBit 2.2 | 8.5 MB
View: BleachBit Home page