BleachBit 6.0.0

Submitted by andrew on

BleachBit 6.0.0 Release Notes

BleachBit 6.0.0 is our biggest release in years, featuring significant new features, deeper browser cleaning, and many usability improvements. Key highlights include a new cookie manager, improved browser cleaning for Chromium and Firefox, new Vivaldi and Zen browser cleaners, and numerous interface enhancements. This release represents months of development work with over 100 improvements and fixes.

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Changes since version 5.0.2

All Platforms

New Features

  • Cookie manager: A new cookie manager lets you choose which cookies to keep when cleaning Chromium- and Firefox-based browsers.
  • New browser support: Added cleaners for the Vivaldi and Zen web browsers.
  • Deeper browser cleaning (Chromium-based, including Google Chrome): Now cleans component cache, extension cache, Graphite Dawn cache, shader cache, DIPS, crash reports, code cache, media device salts, reporting data, IndexedDB, network state, and search suggestions. Additional databases are vacuumed and cache handling is improved for snap and Flatpak installations.
  • Deeper browser cleaning (Firefox, LibreWolf, Waterfox): Now cleans storage, permissions, bounce tracking protection, site security state, alternate services, favicons, and session backups. Cache handling is also improved for snap and Flatpak installations.
  • Major improvements to Opera cleaning.
  • Reorganized browser options: Firefox and Chromium-based browser options have been reorganized under a clearer "Site data" category.
  • Improved session option descriptions for web browsers.
  • Expert mode: A new expert mode option adds guardrails for less experienced users by restricting advanced operations. Users upgrading from versions older than 5.1.0 may need to enable expert mode to access all features that previously did not have guardrails.
  • CLI negation support: The command-line interface now supports negation. See the CLI documentation for details.
  • Paste paths from clipboard: Press Ctrl+V in the main window to paste files for shredding. Previously, only files copied from a file manager were accepted; now plain text paths (e.g., copied from Notepad) are also supported.
  • Chaff improvements: Faster chaff generation, flexible stop conditions (file count, total size, free space percentage), a stop button, and a completion message. The UI no longer freezes while downloading chaff data.

User Interface

  • Remember warning choices: You can now opt out of future confirmations directly from the confirmation dialog. (Requires expert mode.)
  • Skip preview when deletion confirmation is disabled. (Requires expert mode.)
  • Custom paths: Visual cues now distinguish custom paths from the allowlist. A context menu makes it easy to manage custom paths. A warning is shown if a protected path is added, which can be bypassed in expert mode.
  • Improved preferences dialog appearance and layout. BleachBit Preferences showing the Cookies tab in the sidebar
  • System Information dialog: Added a button to anonymize system information before sharing.
  • Improved dark theme contrast for error log text.
  • Improved tree view for expert mode: When expert mode is disabled, a warning icon appears next to options that have warnings (such as deleting browser passwords). Toggling these protected options is blocked, and an info bar explains how to enable expert mode.
  • Clarified Chromium sync cleaning: In Chromium-based browsers, cleaning sync data will delete web apps. If the browser syncs to the cloud, web app data can be restored.
  • Renamed "overwrite free space" to "wipe empty space" for clarity, with an elaborated warning message. Also, BleachBit now helps users delete orphaned wipe files if the process is interrupted.
  • Renamed "whitelist" to "allowlist" throughout the application for clearer, more descriptive terminology that directly communicates function.
  • Info bars replace modal alert dialogs for a smoother, more streamlined experience.
  • Locked preferences: Preferences set via the command line (for example, --gui --no-delete-confirmation --overwrite --debug), are locked in the GUI and not recorded to the configuration file.

Bug Fixes

  • Fix: Do not report a file as deleted when access is denied.
  • Fix: Do not shred hard links.
  • Fix: Avoid an error when cleaning Firefox URL history.
  • Fix: Hyperlink from GUI to help/support page.
  • Fix: UnicodeEncodeError when displaying filenames with special characters.
  • Fix: GUI deadlock when loading malformed XML cleaner files.
  • Fix: --debug CLI option.
  • Fix: --shred is now exclusive as expected.
  • Fix: Excess whitespace in dialogs.
  • Fix: Prevent opening preferences dialog when using --gui --shred from the command line.

Performance

  • Improved speed of XML parsing.
  • Improved speed of chaff generation.

Localization

Windows

New Features

  • Deeper browser cookie cleaning: More cookie locations are now cleaned for Chromium and Brave on Windows, and a new cookie location is supported for Microsoft Edge.
  • LibreOffice version 4 cleaning is now supported.
  • Windows installer is now localized: The installer can be displayed in your language. If your language is not available, consider contributing a translation.
  • Updated code signing timestamp protocol for the Windows installer and application: now using the RFC 3161 timestamp protocol with SHA-256, replacing the Authenticode protocol which used SHA-1.
  • winreg search type for CleanerML: Allows cleaning apps installed in a path defined by a Windows registry key.
  • Winapp2.ini: Added support for exclusion of registry keys (ExcludeKey#=REG), completing full support for the Winapp2.ini format.
  • Friendly message when switching user profiles: When the application is started from a standard account and the user elevates privileges using a different account, a notification explains that cleaning user-specific paths (such as browser data) will only affect the elevated account. Tip: Declining the UAC dialog when prompted will run the application with standard permissions, which is a good choice when cleaning only your user profile, unless file overwriting is required.
  • Add a warning for the "Update Uninstaller" option in the System cleaner.
  • Context menu in Windows Explorer now loads BleachBit faster.

Bug Fixes

  • Important fix: Do not follow directory junctions/symlinks in the Recycle Bin. This prevents unintended data loss.
  • Fix: Read-only files were not properly deleted.
  • Fix: "Access denied" error when getting the size of certain files.
  • Fix: Treat "access denied" errors differently than "file locked by another process."
  • Fix: Avoid crash when the SSLKEYLOGFILE environment variable is set.
  • Fix: Avoid crash when run from a folder named bin or lib.
  • Fix: Application icon appearance.
  • Fix: Splash screen appearance is now a simpler design with just the logo and a transparent background.
  • Fix: Error on first start with disconnected network drives.
  • Fix: Poor contrast with Windows 10 theme.
  • Workaround: A new dialog on first launch asks user whether they are experiencing blurry or unreadable fonts, and offers a workaround by switching the font rendering backend. The preference dialog has a new option for toggling the font rendering backend.

Performance & Updates

  • Improved speed of overwriting files when running with administrator privileges.
  • Improved Windows update cleaning: services are stopped in fewer cases, and unneeded error messages are suppressed.
  • Updated bundled libraries: Python 3.12 and GTK 3.24.51.

Linux

New Features

  • Flatpak support: Cleaning now works for ungoogled Chromium and Chromium (org.chromium.Chromium) installed via Flatpak.
  • LibreOffice: Cleans recent documents on Linux.
  • Partition wiping: Calls fstrim when available for more thorough SSD cleaning.
  • Dark mode warning: Users are now warned about that some system themes do not support dark mode.
  • New distribution packages:
    • Ubuntu 25.10, Ubuntu 26.04
    • Linux Mint 22.3

Package Signing

Previously, .deb and .rpm packages were not signed directly and could only be verified using detached signatures or a signed checksum file. Now, these packages are signed with the maintainer's key, giving you three verification options:

  1. Verify the package signature directly
  2. Use the detached signature
  3. Use the signed checksum file

See the installation documentation for details.

Bug Fixes

  • Fix: Auto-hide for snap and pacman cleaners.
  • Fix: .ini cleaning for the KDE6 staterc file.
  • Fix: Improved the accuracy of estimated completion time for wiping empty space for non-root users.
  • Fix: Prevent crash when xhost is not installed.
  • Fix: Prevent exception when reading cleaner files with broken character encoding.
  • Fix: Regex in pacman_cache().
  • Improved exception handling for yum/dnf.
  • Improved error message when the requests library is missing.
  • Removed outdated code from the memory cleaner.

Other changes

For Developers

  • New Docker-based test system for running automated tests across multiple Linux distributions and environments.
  • pytest support introduced for unit testing (alongside existing unittest), including parallel test execution.
  • New browser testing site: browsergym.bleachbit.org for testing browser cleaning behavior.
  • Major code cleanup and refactoring.
  • CleanerML: Added winreg search type for registry-defined install paths, and ExcludeKey#=REG support in Winapp2.ini.
  • Fix Coveralls integration.
  • Added hidden --no-delete-confirmation CLI argument (for automated testing).
  • Improved compatibility with pytest.
  • List of commits
  • List of closed issues

Website & Documentation

  • Major improvements to the documentation site at docs.bleachbit.org.
  • The first localized pages on bleachbit.org in Spanish, Italian, and German cover the homepage, download, features, and help pages.

Coming soon

We are working on a major overhaul of the graphical user interface.

We are backporting fixes and improvements to BleachBit 4.6.3 for Windows XP and Windows 7.

Stay tuned!

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