BleachBit 5.0.0

Submitted by andrew on Fri, 05/02/2025 - 09:18

We are pleased to announce the release of BleachBit 5.0.0. This major update introduces new and improved cleaners, enhanced language selection flexibility, important security updates, and numerous other improvements.

By the way, you can now follow us on Bluesky.

Upgrade now

Changes

These are the changes since version 4.6.2:

  • Add a display-language option in preferences (demo video)
  • Enable closing the application via CTRL+Q or CTRL+W
  • Make updates notifications less intrusive
  • Fix the --debug command line switch
  • Clean variants of Discord such as beta and snap
  • Fix loading of personal cleaners in portable mode
  • Improve experience on multi-user systems by ignoring other users' running processes
  • Prevent invalid entries in the custom and whitelist tabs
  • Improve stability significantly

Linux

  • Clean Librewolf
  • Clean non-beta Microsoft Edge
  • Clean Bash's temporary files
  • Clean Geary, the email client
  • Improve cleaning of rotated logs
  • Improve cleaning of broken .desktop files
  • Add AppIndicator icon
  • Fix CleanerML external processes with spaces
  • Fix usage of dconf as external command
  • Add .rpm packages for Fedora 41 and 42, and CentOS 9 Stream
  • Add .deb packages for Ubuntu 24.10 and Ubuntu 25.04

Windows

  • Patch DLL-related vulnerabilities (CVE-2023-47113, CVE-2025-32780)
  • Protect MMC snap-ins (e.g., Device Manager, Computer Management)
  • Upgrade to Python 3.11.10 and GTK 3.24.43
  • Update NSIS installer to 3.11
  • Add metadata such as company name to bleachbit.exe
  • Drop support for starting on Windows XP and 7
  • Update the Windows 10 theme by Christian Medel
  • Fix SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED error on update checks

Developers

Known issues

After changing the display language in the preferences, the new display language takes effect immediately except for the application menu. For the full effect, restart the application.

When BleachBit version 5.0.0 is unpacked, the Windows installer and Windows portable version are much larger than than they were in BleachBit 4.6.2. The primary reasons are: (1) there were major framework updates to Python and GTK, (2) executable decompression was temporarily disabled to minimize bugs in the first 5.x release, and (3) other size optimizations have not been attempted yet. You can try a few, quick optimizations yourself. First, download UPX executable packer and run this: upx.exe --best --nrv2e c:\program files (x86)\bleachbit\*. Compressing the DLL and PYD files shrinks them from 35 MB to 15 MB, saving 20 MB. Next, open the directory c:\program files (x86)\bleachbit\ and delete any languages you do not use. Deleting all languages recovers 3 MB. Both optimizations reduce the size on disk to 21MB. If you notice any issues, please retest without the optimizations by reinstalling.

Looking ahead

For this release, invested considerable effort to upgrade the Python and GTK frameworks for Windows, along with comprehensive code cleanup. These foundational improvements set the stage for exciting upcoming features including a cookie manager (UI preview), a redesigned user interface (UI preview), more responsiveness when wiping free space (UI preview), and over-the-air (OTA) updates to an expanded cleaner library.

Upgrade now

Blog tags: 
release