Second profile data not deleted unless Brave exits

Description of the issue:
I have 2 Brave profiles on my work computer. I use the main profile for work and the 2nd profile for personal browsing. The 2nd profile is configured to delete all data (cookies, history, downloads, auto-fill data, etc) upon exit. The main profile does not have this setting as I need to keep data on the work profile.
This above configuration worked fine up until recently when I noticed that this stopped working. I closed the 2nd profile but then opened it again a few minutes later, I saw that the history was not deleted. The data is deleted on the 2nd profile only if I close Brave completely not leaving any profiles open at all.

How can this issue be reproduced?

  1. Install new instance of Brave browser.
  2. Create the first profile with normal settings.
  3. Create a second profile configured to clear all data on exit.
  4. Use both profiles to create test data.
  5. Close Profile 2 and reopen to find all data, cookies & history remain.
  6. Close all instances of Brave from both profiles and reopen. The data on profile 1 remains as it because it is not configured to do anything. The data on profile 2 has now been deleted.

Expected result:
When closing all the open windows for any particular profile, the data of that profile should be deleted disregarding the fact that other profiles may remain open at the time. The clear data should work independently for each profile.

Brave Version: [
Version 1.46.144 Chromium: 108.0.5359.128 (Official Build) (64-bit)

Additional Information:
I donā€™t know if this is a bug or a feature change in the Brave browser. If it was done intentionally, I feel doesnā€™t make sense and would like to see the deletion of data done independently on a profile level. This worked up until a few weeks ago.

When testing to see if I can replicate this issue, I noticed that the clear data on exit options were configured correctly: Brave Settings/Privacy and Security/Clear browsing data/on exit
However, when opening the same options from the History window, I noticed that none of the options were selected: History/Clear browsing data/On exit

Clear_from_settings
Clear_from_history

Please advise and thanks in advance for the support.

@krsane,
Thank you for reaching out to us.
I believe that I myself have raised this issue to the team before but I donā€™t see anything on our Github about it ā€” give me some time to dig/ask around.

That said, the logic here is that the browser clears data on exit ā€” that is, exiting the browser completely, including other browser process (like profiles), rather than clearing on ā€œcloseā€, which is what the ā€œxā€ button does.

I personally do not agree with this logic and believe this (Clear data on Exit) should work on a ā€œper profileā€ basis as this makes more sense intuitively and makes the expected behavior clear. Iā€™m reaching out to the team now to see what (if anything) we can do about this.

Thank you again for reporting.

2 Likes

Thanks for your feedback @Mattches.

It seems our thinking is aligned on this issue. I look forward to your response when you have an update.

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@krsane,
Iā€™ve opened the following issue for the team to review. While I think this will actually end up being a non-trivial change (if we do decide to implement it at all) I think itā€™s still a good idea to call this behavior out.

+1 Agreed

I thought this was how it workedā€¦ this probably explains the ā€œglitchā€ I was seeing where I had to manually clear past data when opening a profile even though I had clear on exit setā€¦ Live and learn.

1 Like

Hi @Mattches ,

Thanks for the update. Please keep in mind that this ā€˜problematicā€™ behaviour only started recently. I canā€™t provide a sepcific timeline, but up until about a month ago, It worked as we expect that it should. This has changed in a recent update that disabled or broken the clearing of data per profile.

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