I have a question about the browser setting.
There is a setting to clear all browser data upon exist.
And below, there a whitelist, website listed there will not have browser data cleared.
Did you guys remove that setting?
That setting is like super important.
Now when I quite the browser, all website data get cleared.
Where is the whitelist?
Also something is very wrong with the new setting layouts.
You have a website white list for third party cookies.
But something is very wrong there. It’s either the description issue or the function issue.
@vincent2394 what you’re asking about is in the same exact location as it had been before, but was renamed. It’s On-device site data now. That’s all. So Settings → Privacy & security → Site & Shields Settings → On-device site data (which is under additional content settings.)
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Thank you so much for the info. I found the section.
One more question:
What’s the difference between Clear browsing data - On exit and On-device site data - Delete data sites have saved to your device when you close all windows?
It seems both remove cookies and website data on exit.
I’ll have to defer to @Mattches or someone else from Brave for 100% confirmation, but my assumption is what you said. I think they just have multiple places where you can choose similar option. To be honest, this is a change made on Chromium and just had been inherited by Brave.
I think the primary disconnect here is on Chrome, they no longer have the Clear Browsing Data - On Exit, as you can see in screenshot below:
So Brave is doing some extra steps to keep that menu I guess, but then creating a duplicate option by doing so.
Honestly, Forget me when I close this site in Shields settings, which is brave://settings/shields would do the same exact thing as well. Meaning Brave has three different toggles that all essentially do the same thing.
But as I said, hoping Mattches or someone else from Brave can confirm that or for them to let us know how they might differ.
Just keep in mind it’s Friday night and they usually aren’t active on weekends or American holidays. So it’ll likely be a few days before we see any response.
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Thanks a lot.
I did some experiments.
It seems Clear Browsing Data - On Exit clears all data including the whitelisted websites even if I don’t tick the Site and Shields Settings option.
The Clear Browsing Data - On Exit shows the number of websites it will clear. But that number is greater than my whitelisted websites even after I close and open the browser.
It makes me wonder if the browser data really is cleared with " Delete data sites have saved to your device when you close all windows".
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@vincent2394 yeah, we’ll have to get it. I answered more definitively as others had said it worked and I had no issues when I tested. Even just now I tested again and no problem (initially). Just was one big hiccup on my own testing. I closed the browser but I have it set to allow Brave to run in the background. That, combined with one of the extensions I use, means Brave actually kept running even when closed. So it never registered as if I exited.
Once I chose to Exit Brave and reopened, everything was lost. So yeah, combination meant I wasn’t quite accurate on that. Sorry. And it is indeed confusing to see some of the various options.
I’m going to go ahead and tag @fanboynz as he goes completely random and crazy hours on here compared to a lot of the others at Brave. Might be interesting to see if he might have more thorough answers. If not, we’ll just have to hang tight and see if Mattches can answer or get in touch with some of the devs to find out what is going on with each of these settings and give us exact answers.
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Apologies for the late reply here.
I’m a bit confused about what options you’re referring to here:
Where exactly is the second option that you’re seeing? The Clear browsing data --> [On exit] option has been available for a long time and can be found by going to Settings --> History --> Clear browsing data --> [On Exit]. Can either of you tell me where the other is?
@Mattches the three similar sounding but seemingly different options are:
-
On-device site data - Delete data sites have saved to your device when you close all windowswhich is atbrave://settings/content/siteData -
Clear browsing dataOn Exitatbrave://settings/clearBrowserData -
Forget me when I close this sitewhich can be enabled atbrave://settings/shields
Reading the definitions, all of them seem to say they would clear all of your data, such as cookies, when you exit the browser.
We used to have a section of the browser similar to #1 which referred to cookies. If people added to the whitelist there, it wouldn’t clear out even if they told #2 to delete all cookies. That option has seemed to disappear about the same time that things were moved to where cookies are listed under Third-Party Cookies.
And just to add to that, the On-device site data makes it sound like it’s just 1p cookies. The description mentions things like keeping you signed into a site or saving items in your shopping cart.
And below the above, is an option for whitelist and all, sites you want to allow or block.
So that said, I would like to see if we can figure out the differences between the three and what did happen to the options we had to make websites exempt so cookies wouldn’t be removed even if we were set to clear all cookies on exit or whatever.
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So basically:
Clear browsing data --> [On exit]is a setting we added that allows quick access for users to clear the selected data items when the browser is [fully] closed.- The
brave://settings/content/siteDatais specific to first-party cookies and would be included in data to be cleared in the first option if theCookies and other site dataoption were selected. - The
Forget me when I close this siteis a Shields setting that is applied on a per-site basis if the option is toggled on. At this time it will not show up on any list. This option essentially clears all site data when the site (tab) is closed or when you leave the site by visiting a different one on the same tab.
I would recommend using Forget me when I close this site for specific sites that you “never” want to remember your data on.
If you want to clear Brave entirely of a particular data type when you close the browser, use the Clear browsing data --> [On exit] option.
Hope this helps
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This is actually listed on global. Even if turned on globally, would it still just be a per site basis? Or would it be global and people would toggle individually on a per site basis for any websites they don’t want to have info removed from? (sorry, I should test for myself, but lazy right now and would also rather get official answer on intent and usage)
It kind of does. But I know in tracking what OP is asking and what I’ve seen elsewhere, people are wanting an option where Brave would clear All data except these sites where they can then list particular websites where the data remains. This doesn’t seem to be an option based on what we discussed, except perhaps using the Forget me when I close this site option.
To be clear on this again, there used to be an option to exempt sites from this prompt. But that has seemed to be moved or disappeared. The exemption list looked a lot like we see at the On-site data portion.
This is correct — if this were turned on globally, that would mean that every site would forget you after you left it. So if you wanted that to be the general behavior for all sites with the exception of community.brave.com, accounts.google.com and reddit.com, for example, you’d turn it on globally, then visit those sites and toggle the option “off” in the Shields panel for those sites.
This is something that I’ve bee suggesting we implement for a while now and have logged an issue for it here:
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Ah, I see. I think I discovered the disconnect. And looking through I notice what the difference was. Honestly, I think it’s bad design for UX when there’s a lot of options scattered in different menus. Ideally should be together and have a clear differentiator.
It seems what people shared in the past were things like below:
Then looking at that Github, the differentiator was that the option to clear cookies when closing windows is what people were having to use.
Where it worked was people doing things like below:
@vincent2394 if you want to test it, this should actually still work the same way. So what they discovered and said over the years was to turn the toggle to delete when closing the browser. This had been under cookies, but was renamed as I mentioned earlier to be brave://settings/content/siteData.
So if you change that to Delete data sites have saved to your device when you close all windows then it will clear all cookies. And if you add anything on the Allowed to save data on your device would be the whitelist.
Then you just would have to make sure the On Exit part of clear data like you’re using doesn’t have the Cookies and site data option, as that will clear and ignore any exemptions.
So it’s two different ways to accomplish the same task, except one lets you whitelist websites whereas the other doesn’t.
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I just discovered there is another option that can do the same thing.
Forget me when I close the site.
It’s strange that this option only shows on one of my laptops but not another one.
I guess you guys are doing some kind of A/B testing?
Like some settings exist on one brave but no another, but both braves have the same version number.
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