Clear your browser's cache and history

Hi, everyone, this is Sean from VisiHow and today I'm going to be showing you how to clear your browser's cache and history. This is going to be for Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Internet Explorer. It's going to be using their in-browser tools but also programs that are outside of that which you can use to do a more thorough cleaning, or cleaning everything at once.

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   The reason you might want to clear your browser's cache, cookies, or history - especially the cache - is because it gets filled up with unwanted files that are just temporary files that take up a lot of space

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   You can use that to clear it out. I have a written article on VisiHow as well about the same subject, and it also has Safari in there since I can write about that and show images of that - but I can't show a video of that because I'm using Windows PC. You can check it out here: https://visihow.com/Clear_Your_Browser_Cache_and_Cookies.

   

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   The first browser we'll go to is Mozilla Firefox

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   On the top right there is going to be a menu button. It looks like a couple of little lines. You click on that, and click on "History." A new menu will pop up then and on there you click "Clear recent History," and as soon as you do that it's going to give you a bunch of different options for what you want to do.

   

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   You can get even more options by clicking on "Details." This will expand the box as you can see and shows you what to clear

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   From there you can pick Cache, Cookies, logins, lots of different things

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   You generally just want to do "default" unless you know what you're doing, because some of those things might make it easier for you to return to websites and do things that you might actually want and find useful.

   

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   Now let's move over to Google Chrome, which has the exact same type of menu

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   On the top right you're going to see the same three little lines. You go to history, or you can click Ctrl H.

   

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   As you can see, it's going to show you everything you have here

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   Click "Clear browsing data," and the same kind of thing where a new menu's going to open up and you get a bunch of different options for what you want to clear

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   Most of these are pretty safe, and the default selection's pretty good. You can do everything for the past hour, the past day, the past week, beginning of time (the entire time you've had Google Chrome). Any of those will work.

   

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   Select whatever you want and then click "Clear browsing data." Pretty much exactly the same as Mozilla Firefox

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   Now let's move on over to Internet Explorer, which is slightly different

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   For this you click on the tools menu on the top right, and click "Internet Options."

   

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    Here you're going to want to go right down to the bottom where it says "browsing history." You can select this to delete your browsing history every single time you turn off Internet Explorer

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    Or you can press Delete Now and you see all these options, very similar options to Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome

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    Just select whatever you want to do and then press Delete. Simple! Just like the other two.

    

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    If you don't like any of those options, or you want to do it more efficiently or more thoroughly, then you can use CCleaner, or the Windows Disc Cleanup tool, which I'm going to show right now

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    First I'm going to show CCleaner. I'm going to go to the website, which is Piriform.com and then CCleaner. It's much easier to just go to Google or Bing and search for it. It is a free tool that you can use to delete all kinds of temporary files and also registry stuff. But the registry stuff is very complicated and we're not even going to touch that. I've never touched it.

    

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    Let me open up the actual program here so we can check it out

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    As you can see, it has cleanup for applications, it's got Internet Explorer here, System Files, lots of things. All kinds of applications.

    

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    You can tell it to analyze and it'll tell you exactly how much data it can clean

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    When you press Run Cleaner it's going to delete everything permanently. This is a super useful tool since you can clean out everything at once. You just can't have any of those things open, and it actually cleans them so well that it kind of feels like you haven't used the browser before when you go back. Like it's a fresh install. Which could be exactly what you're looking for, or not - who knows. You always have lots of options.

    

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    And for our last option, let's go look at Windows Disc Cleanup

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    For this you're going to want to open your Start menu, and look for Cleanup. For some reason if you do "Disc cleanup," it doesn't find it. So just do Cleanup.

    

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    It's going to ask you what drive you want to clean

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    I have two main drives, C and G, and I'm going to do C. It's going to scan everything and then tell you how much you can delete.

    

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    As you can see from this, I have about a gig and a half of space I can clear here

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    It shows temporary internet files, recycle bin, debug files which you might not want to delete because that's related to things crashing, setup logs, errors, temporary files - temporary files is going to be the main bulk of memory that is being taken up. It's usually what you want to delete, that and temporary internet files. This kind of overlaps with CCleaner, except this also gets some stuff that CCleaner doesn't touch.

    

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    Between all of this, between the Disc Cleanup and CCleaner, and each of these browsers' in-browser tool for cleaning up their histories and cache and cookies and everything, you have lots of options for getting rid of all of that extra memory that it's taking up, and your history, and whatever you want to get rid of

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    So please check all this stuff out, and if you have any questions about anything, feel free to ask on the article. Thanks for watching this VisiHow video!

    

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If you have problems with any of the steps in this article, please ask a question for more help, or post in the comments section below.

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