Clear browsing data on exit

[donkey]

Description of the issue:
Clear browsing data on exit works when I use menu option Exit, but doesn’t clear any data if I close browser by pressing ‘X’ on upper-right corner or if I close all tabs and browser is closed.
How can this issue be reproduced?

1. Open the browser → set Clear data on exit (Settings->Privacy)
2. Visit any website
3. Close the browser window by pressing X on upper-right corner
4. Open browser window again and check History data from Menu.

Expected result:
History should be empty.

Brave Version( check About Brave):
Brave v 1.58.127 Chromium: 117.0.5938.88 (Official Build) (64-bit)
Linux Ubuntu 20.04.6 LTS

Additional Information:
This feature worked earlier, but latest update from SnapStore has changed its behaviour.

[Saoiray]

@donkey

Open the browser → set Clear data on exit (Settings->Privacy)

Which one did you choose? There’s two different places.

or

Cookies and Site data does not mean History. Those are two different things. Also one of those is On exit where the other is when close all windows. Depending on your settings, this behavior can be slightly different as well. So I just want to check here what you’ve done.

[donkey]

Hi, and thanks for quick answer.

Both options are chosen:

[Saoiray]

@donkey Right, so I think I better understand your issue and the thoughts. But I will explain and then ask you to confirm a couple things.

If I’m seeing your original topic, your issue is that history isn’t clearing. I see you have it set for On Exit, but this requires the browser to be completely exited in many situations. A big disconnect for some people is that just closing the browser isn’t always seen as exiting the browser.

One major way this comes into play is the settings as you see below:

If you have your settings at brave://settings/system put to have Brave run in the background, closing the last window won’t exit. This is particularly the case if you’re using extensions. Such as when I close all of my windows, I still see Brave active on the System Tray on Windows:

I would then have to manually exit or change the setting via the symbol in the system tray

All of that said, can you check if you have this setting enabled? If so, you’ll either want to disable it or you may have to recognize what’s happening and go the one extra step of manually exiting.

NOTE

Not all extensions will let Brave keep running in the background. For example, I had DeepL that would close out with Brave. But when I installed ibotta, it keeps it running continuously. So this will be a roll of the dice depending on your extensions used, assuming that’s the issue. And depending on how extensions or the browser changed, it might be why the behavior changed.

[Saoiray]

And yeah, it’s a but weird and little annoying I guess in that difference. Cookies would be clearing because you have the setting enabled to clear when closing all windows. But like said, this is different than “on exit.” Such a small difference in meaning and not always picked up by people.

You’re seeing cookies be cleared, such as being logged out of sites. It just was history and other things selected in the On Exit portion not being removed, right?

[donkey]

Yes, you’re right that cookies were cleared when I closed window / all tabs. But history was not cleared.

But now I disabled “Continue running background apps when Brave is closed”, and now also history data is cleared when I close window. I don’t use any extensions so that’s not a case.

But anyway, now I know what different options I can use. Thanks a lot !