Auto History Wipe VS Selfcommit.dev

Auto History Wipe's answer

Most privacy tools ask you to trust them. This one can be checked before you install it. Open the permission list: there is no site access permission in it at all. The extension never requests access to the pages you visit, so it has no technical ability to read them — that is not a policy promise, it is a limit on what Chrome will let it do. It also has no server to contact, no account to create, and no analytics or telemetry code, so every setting and every record of what was cleared stays on your own machine. Most extensions in this category ask for broad access in order to delete a cache; this one does the same job through Chrome's own browsing-data API instead.

Auto History Wipe's answer

People who share a computer and would rather the next person did not inherit their browsing history — a family machine, a shared desk, a laptop that gets borrowed. Two related groups sit alongside them: people keeping a work browser separate from personal use, and people whose disk keeps filling with cache and who want it emptied on a schedule rather than by hand.

The common thread is not paranoia. It is the ordinary preference that a browser should not keep a permanent record of everywhere you have been, held by people who do not want to think about it every day. That is why the defaults are conservative and the automation is opt-in: it is built for someone who sets it once and stops noticing it.

Auto History Wipe's answer

Three things you can verify rather than take on faith.

First, the permissions: no site access, so it cannot see your browsing.

Second, the control. You choose exactly which data types are cleared — history, cache, cookies, download history, form data, and optionally saved passwords, local storage, Service Workers and IndexedDB — over a time range from the last hour to all time, running at startup or hourly, every 12 hours, daily or weekly. Domains you whitelist keep their cookies, cache and site storage, and you can protect every bookmarked site in one switch, so you stay signed in where it matters.

Third, it tells you what it cannot do. Browsing history, downloads and form data are always cleared everywhere, because Chrome gives extensions no way to preserve them site by site. Knowing that before you install is worth more than a feature list that skips it.

It is free, with no paid tier and no feature held back behind an account.

Auto History Wipe's answer

Jem Jack has spent ten years building browser extensions, after years working in-house at private software companies.

Auto History Wipe came out of a plain irritation. The tools for clearing browsing data were either buried in browser settings, where they are easy to forget, or they were extensions that asked for permission to read every page you visit in order to delete a cache. For a privacy tool, that trade-off is backwards: you were handing over more access than the job needs.

So it was built the other way round. It asks for no site access at all, keeps every setting on the device, and does the cleaning through Chrome's own browsing-data API. Everything the extension knows about you stays on your machine, because there is nowhere else for it to go.

It is designed, written and maintained end to end by one person, and published to Chrome, Edge and Firefox in 49 languages.

Auto History Wipe's answer

Chrome extension Manifest V3. The interface is React with MUI, styled through Emotion, bundled into split chunks with webpack.

The work itself runs through Chrome's own extension APIs rather than anything custom: chrome.browsingData for the clearing, chrome.alarms for scheduling, chrome.storage.local for settings and statistics, chrome.commands for the keyboard shortcut, chrome.notifications for the optional completion message, and chrome.bookmarks for bookmark protection — requested only if you switch that feature on, and revocable afterwards.

There is no backend of any kind: no server, no database, no API of our own. The 49 interface languages are JSON files bundled inside the extension and read locally with chrome.runtime.getURL, which is the only fetch the extension makes.