How to Clear Browser Cache in Chrome, Edge and Firefox

Cache, cookies and history are three different things

The cache is a folder of copies: images, scripts, fonts and stylesheets the browser saved so the second visit to a site renders without downloading them again. It is pure convenience data — every byte of it can be fetched again from the network. On a machine used daily, each browser profile typically holds a few hundred megabytes to a couple of gigabytes of cache, because Chromium-based browsers size the cache from the free space on the drive.

Cookies are a completely different animal. They are the small tokens that tell a site who you are, so deleting them signs you out of everything at once: mail, bank, forums, the “remember this device” flag on two-factor logins, and whatever sat in a shopping cart. Nothing about a cookie makes the browser faster, and nothing about clearing the cache touches them unless you tick that box yourself.

History, autofill entries and saved passwords are three more independent switches in the same dialog. The practical rule for routine cleaning: clear cache freely and often, clear history when you care about privacy on a shared PC, and clear cookies only when you are debugging a broken login or a checkout page that refuses to move.

Chrome, Edge, Opera, Brave: one dialog covers all of them

Every Chromium browser shares the same “Clear browsing data” dialog, so learning it once is enough. Press Ctrl+Shift+Del, or paste the direct address: chrome://settings/clearBrowserData, edge://settings/clearBrowserData, opera://settings/clearBrowserData, brave://settings/clearBrowserData. The single most-missed control in that dialog is the time range at the top — it defaults to the last hour, which is why people report that clearing “did nothing”. Set it to “All time”.

The Advanced tab adds items the Basic tab hides: download history, site settings (per-site camera, microphone and notification permissions), and hosted app data. Site settings and hosted app data are worth leaving alone — wiping them makes every site ask for permissions again and breaks offline-capable web apps. If Chrome or Edge is signed in and syncing, remember that history is synced data: deleting it here deletes it on your phone too. Cache is never synced.

• Cached images and files — always safe, costs one slower page load
• Cookies and other site data — signs you out everywhere, use deliberately
• Browsing history — safe; on a synced profile it is removed from other devices too
• Download history — safe; the downloaded files themselves stay on disk
• Site settings — rarely worth clearing; every site re-asks for permissions
• Hosted app data — breaks offline web apps until they re-download their data
• Passwords and autofill — never part of routine cleaning

Firefox: same shortcut, different wording

Ctrl+Shift+Del in Firefox opens “Clear Recent History”, where the cache entry is called “Cached Web Content” and the cookie entry is “Cookies and Site Data”. The same controls live in Settings → Privacy & Security, reachable directly as about:preferences#privacy, where the “Clear Data” button splits the two into separate checkboxes with the current size shown next to each. That size readout is useful: it tells you whether clearing is worth doing at all.

Firefox also has the setting that makes manual clearing unnecessary: “Delete cookies and site data when Firefox is closed”, combined with a “Manage Exceptions” allow-list. Put the five or six sites you want to stay signed in on that list, and every other site is forgotten at every shutdown. For a quick look at what the cache currently holds, the internal page about:cache reports entry count and total size per storage type.

Where the cache actually sits on disk

Knowing the paths matters for two situations: the browser will not start, and you want to see how much space a browser really occupies before deciding anything. Paste any of these into the Explorer address bar — the environment variables expand on their own. The profile folder named Default is the first profile; extra profiles are Profile 1, Profile 2 and so on.

• Chrome — %LOCALAPPDATA%\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Cache\Cache_Data
• Edge — %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Edge\User Data\Default\Cache
• Brave — %LOCALAPPDATA%\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\User Data\Default\Cache
• Opera — %LOCALAPPDATA%\Opera Software\Opera Stable\Cache
• Vivaldi — %LOCALAPPDATA%\Vivaldi\User Data\Default\Cache
• Firefox cache — %LOCALAPPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<profile>\cache2
• Firefox profile data — %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<profile>

Deleting cache folders by hand — and the folder you must not touch

With the browser fully closed (check Task Manager: Chrome and Edge leave background processes running if “Continue running background apps” is on), you can open any Cache folder above, select everything inside and delete it. The browser recreates the folder structure on the next launch. Files that refuse to delete usually mean the browser is still running; end its processes and try again.

The line you must not cross is the parent folder. Deleting %LOCALAPPDATA%\Google\Chrome\User Data as a whole wipes bookmarks, saved passwords, extensions, open tabs and cookies — that is the entire profile, not the cache. The same applies to %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles, which holds Firefox bookmarks and logins while the cache lives under %LOCALAPPDATA%. If you are unsure which profile folder belongs to the window in front of you, open chrome://version and read the “Profile Path” line, or about:profiles in Firefox.

Profiles and Windows accounts: the gigabytes most cleanups miss

Clearing browsing data inside a window only clears that profile. A browser with a work profile, a personal profile and a guest profile keeps three independent caches, three cookie stores and three history databases, and the dialog you just used touched exactly one of them. This is the most common reason a browser still occupies several gigabytes right after someone “cleared everything”.

The second hiding place is other Windows accounts. %LOCALAPPDATA% resolves per user, so a family PC with three accounts has three complete copies of every installed browser's cache, and none of them is reachable from your session without administrator rights. The same is true of the Windows “Default” account template if a browser was ever installed system-wide.

Doing this by hand means walking every browser, every profile and every Windows account, and repeating it in a few weeks. Windows offers no help here: Storage Sense and Disk Cleanup deliberately skip browser data entirely. This is the narrow job where a cleaner earns its place — Kleaner PRO's browser module enumerates installed browsers and all their profiles, shows the size found for each, and clears cache while leaving cookies, passwords and bookmarks untouched unless you tick them explicitly.

When clearing the cache is the actual fix

A stale cache causes a recognizable class of bugs: a site that renders with broken layout for you but is fine on your phone, a page that keeps showing yesterday's prices, a login that loops back to the sign-in form, or an update that a web app insists is not available. Before clearing everything, try the cheap version first: Ctrl+F5 forces a hard reload that bypasses the cache for that one page.

If that is not enough, clear one site instead of all of them. Press F12 to open DevTools, go to the Application tab (Storage in Firefox), and use “Clear site data” — it wipes cache, local storage and cookies for the current domain only, so you stay signed in everywhere else. That is the surgical move, and it resolves most single-site problems in seconds without costing you every other session on the machine.

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