Software  When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.

BleachBit 3.9.0 Beta

BleachBit

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 3.9.0 Beta changelog:

  • In the preferences, switch to the Windows 10 theme and back. Verify the change in appearance happens instantly.

  • Use the application menu to select a folder to be shredded, and verify it previews or deletes.

  • Test Unicode in various ways, including: run BleachBit while logged in under a username with Unicode characters, add unicode paths to the custom files or folders to be cleaned, run BleachBit while the operating system is set to a non-English character set. See also encoding issues targeted for this release.

Specific to Linux

  • Clean VLC MRU, and verify there is not an error related to chardet.

  • Test the .rpm and .deb packages install without any unsatisfiable-dependency errors.

  • Test the applications starts without crashing.

  • Clean LibreOffice or OpenOffice.org, and verify there was not an warning.

  • On Fedora, CentOS, or RHEL, use the new dnf autoremove cleaner.

Tests - These tests are for both Windows and Linux:

  • Test the whole application for regressions related to major changes "under the hood."
  • Run a cleaning operation that takes at least 10 seconds. Before it is done, minimize the BleachBit window, and wait. Verify there is a pop-up notification that it finished.
  • While wiping free space, manipulate the BleachBit application window by resizing and/or moving it. Verify it responds within two seconds.
  • In the preferences, add a custom folder to be cleaned, and verify it was added. Add some files (that you won't mind losing) to the folder. Still in the preferences, enable overwriting files. Then run the cleaner for custom folders (under system), and verify the files in the folder are now gone and that the folder was not renamed to a random name.
  • Test the updated and overhauled cleaner for gPodder.
  • Test the new Discord cleaner.
  • Test Google Chrome: cookies.
  • Test Firefox: cookies, history.
  • Test Opera cleaner in general.

After testing

Download: BleachBit 3.9.0 Beta | 12.1 MB (Open Source)
Download: Portable BleachBit 3.9.0 Beta | 12.9 MB
View: BleachBit Home page

Get alerted to all of our Software updates on Twitter at @NeowinSoftware

Report a problem with article
Next Article

Universal Media Server 9.3.1

Previous Article

TinyWall 3.0.1

Join the conversation!

Login or Sign Up to read and post a comment.

1 Comment - Add comment