Bleachbit For Mac
CCleaner for Mac! Clean up your Mac and keep your browsing behaviour private with CCleaner, the world's favourite computer cleaning tool. Find BleachBit software downloads at CNET Download.com, the most comprehensive source for safe, trusted, and spyware-free downloads on the Web. BleachBit is an application that frees disk space and guards your privacy. It cleans the cache, clears internet history, deletes cookies and logs, shreds temporary files and gets rid of junk that you don't know is there. Cleaner tool for your system - protects your privacy, makes your computer faster. The BleachBit source code is copyrighted under the GNU General Public License version 3. Unless otherwise noted, the web page content is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license and screenshots of BleachBit as public domain. The logo is copyrighted under the GPL.
Published July 12, 2019
Table of Contents
- Features
Bleachbit is a free and open source PC cleaner released in 2008. It’s famously known to be used by Hilary Clinton’s team during her presidential campaign.
Since Bleachbit is 100% free, how does it stack up to the competition? I took the time to play around with Bleachbit and its features so you can see what I think.
Let’s get right into it.
Bleachbit Review
100% free | Not very user friendly | 3.5/5 Effective but basic |
Open source | ||
Effective at freeing disk space | Lacks some features | |
Lightweight |
Does Bleachbit Work?
The answer to this question depends on what you expect from a PC cleaner like Bleachbit. If you are expecting it to speed up your computer, cleaning up files alone won’t achieve this. In fact, the only PC cleaner to actually speed up my computer was Iolo System Mechanic because of its many other features besides PC cleaning.
Official Site For Bleachbit
However, Bleachbit definitely cleans up unneeded files and privacy data effectively. It can also permanently delete files and folders so they can’t even be recovered by specialized software.
Features
Bleachbit is 100% free and open source, so it doesn’t bring as many features to the table as competitors like CCleaner. However, it still has the essentials of a good PC cleaner.
PC Cleaner
This is the main feature of Bleachbit and probably what you’ll be using it for the most. You can selectively choose which types of files you want to get rid of, such as useless application files or your browser privacy data.
The main thing I like about this is the amount of control you have over what gets deleted. In several other PC cleaners, you can’t clean up files from specific applications, only system and privacy data.
One thing that could be improved though is the user friendliness of cleaning your PC with Bleachbit. For example, the log on the right can be confusing and overwhelming for some users. Also, it’s not clear what every option on the left means. Without looking it up, can you tell me what “Vacuum” under Firefox means, or “.DS_Store” under Deep scan?
On the other hand, this kind of detail is great for more experienced users. The log can tell you exactly what’s being deleted, and if you’re familiar with all the types of files, you have a lot of customization.
File Shredder
Bleachbit can permanently delete files and folders so they can never be recovered. It can also wipe your clipboard (what you use to copy+paste), and wipe your Bleachbit settings so no one can tell you’ve used Bleachbit.
Did you know when you delete a file on your PC it can still be recovered? This is because the actual data is still there on your hard drive, and deleting a file only tells Windows “hey, you can overwrite this data on the hard disk with whatever you want, but for now I’ll just make it look like it’s gone to the user.”
However, shredding files and folders with Bleachbit also overwrites file data after deleting it, ensuring it’s gone forever. The “Wipe Free Space” feature is similar. The difference is that it only overwrites free space on a drive or folder so those deleted files can’t be recovered, and doesn’t delete existing files.
Along with shredding files and folders, you can also shred your computer clipboard. I think this is a pretty interesting feature that I haven’t seen in other PC cleaners. It makes sense that I don’t want people to see what I have most recently copied. However, you can easily do it yourself in Windows:L.a. noire download crack.
- Press Windows key + r to open up the Run window
- Type in cmd /c “echo off clip” and press Enter
Finally, you can shred your Bleachbit settings and quit. This is like covering your tracks because without any file evidence (i.e. settings and log files), no one can tell you ran Bleachbit. This is especially true if you uninstall Bleachbit after using the “Shred Settings and Quit” tool.
Customization
Bleachbit has a good amount of options for a PC cleaner, although some of them aren’t very straightforward.
As you can see, you can do things like check for updates, ignore certain folders when cleaning, and add warnings to confirm you actually want to delete files. However, there are a few features I would have liked to see that a lot of other cleaners have:
- Scheduled PC cleaning
- Automatic PC cleaning
- Registry cleaning
In addition, some customization options are confusing. I’m still not completely sure what the “Drives” tab does, and why I would ever want to use IEC sizes instead of SI sizes. Some additional explanations or tooltips would help a lot here.
Maybe I’m asking too much of software that’s 100% free and open source.
Is Bleachbit Safe?
Yes, Bleachbit is completely safe in the sense that it won’t put anything harmful on your computer such as malware. Also, the PC cleaner only deletes temporary, junk, and non-essential files. So it won’t delete anything important.
However, like all PC cleaners, you should be careful about what you manually delete. While the PC cleaner limits itself to certain file types, you can delete anything you want with the file shredder. Keep in mind that files deleted with the file shredder are gone forever, so be careful.
Alternatives
There are many other PC cleaners out there, such as:
If you’re looking for another free PC cleaner with more features and customization options, check out CCleaner or Glary Utilities.
If you’re looking for a PC cleaner that has a cleaner user interface and actually speeds up your computer, check out Iolo System Mechanic.
Conclusion
Overall, Bleachbit is a lightweight, effective PC cleaner. It’s perfect for a quick clean or if you need to wipe some files. I also think it’s impressive that a free and open source PC cleaner became this widely used.
That being said, I think other free cleaners like CCleaner do the job better since they have more features and customization options. If you’re willing to spend some money then you can achieve even better results with Iolo System Mechanic.
Check it out yourself, and let me know what you think.
When your computer is getting full, BleachBit quickly frees disk space. When your information is only your business, BleachBit guards your privacy. With BleachBit you can free cache, delete cookies, clear Internet history, shred temporary files, delete logs, and discard junk you didn't know was there.
Designed for Linux and Windows systems, it wipes clean thousands of applications including Firefox, Internet Explorer, Adobe Flash, Google Chrome, Opera, Safari, and more. Beyond simply deleting files, BleachBit includes advanced features such as shredding files to prevent recovery, wiping free disk space to hide traces of files deleted by other applications, and vacuuming Firefox to make it faster. Better than free, BleachBit is open source.
BleachBit has many useful features:
- Delete your private files so completely that 'even God can't read them' according to South Carolina Representative Trey Gowdy.
- Simple operation: read the descriptions, check the boxes you want, click preview, and click delete.
- Multi-platform: Linux and Windows
- Free of charge and no money trail
- Free to share, learn, and modify (open source)
- No adware, spyware, malware, browser toolbars, or 'value-added software'
- Translated to 64 languages besides American English
- Shred files to hide their contents and prevent data recovery
- Shred any file (such as a spreadsheet on your desktop)
- Overwrite free disk space to hide previously deleted files
- Portable app for Windows: run without installation
- Command line interface for scripting and automation
- CleanerML allows anyone to write a new cleaner using XML
- Automatically import and update winapp2.ini cleaner files (a separate download) giving Windows users access to 2500+ additional cleaners
- Frequent software updates with new features
Going beyond standard deletion of files, BleachBit has several advanced cleaners:
- Clear the memory and swap on Linux
- Delete broken shortcuts on Linux
- Delete the Firefox URL history without deleting the whole file—with optional shredding
- Delete Linux localizations: delete languages you don't use. More powerful than localepurge and available on more Linux distributions.
- Clean APT for Debian, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and Linux Mint
- Find widely-scattered junk such as Thumbs.db and .DS_Store files.
- Execute yum clean for CentOS, Fedora, and Red Hat to remove cached package data
- Delete Windows registry keys—often where MRU (most recently used) lists are stored
- Delete the OpenOffice.org recent documents list without deleting the whole Common.xcu file
- Overwrite free disk space to hide previously files
- Vacuum Firefox, Google Chrome, Liferea, Thunderbird, and Yum databases: shrink files without removing data to save space and improve speed
- Surgically remove private information from .ini and JSON configuration files and SQLite3 databases without deleting the whole file
- Overwrite data in SQLite3 before deleting it to prevent recovery (optional)
These are the changes since version 4.0.0:
- Add cleaner for Zoom (suggested by cybercom02).
- Add cleaner for Pale Moon (thanks to arckat324).
- Add cleaner for Slack messenger (suggested by summonholmes).
- Fix: Preserve bookmarked favicons when cleaning Firefox (reported by Team-Sys, fixed by rados).
- Clean more: Firefox bookmarked sites (reported by KodrosX), moz_origins, favicons .
- Support shredding with deep scan (fixed by Max Khon).
- Support advanced searches in deep scan: nregex, wholeregex, and nwholeregex (fixed by Max Khon).
- Fix: AttributeError error message when using the menu option 'shred settings and quit' (reported by ediowar, fixed by Max Khon).
- Fix: remove 'closest monitor' debugging message (reported by Gitoffthelawn, fixed by Max Khon).
- Fix: set output of chaff to be human readable instead of base64 encoded.
- Fix: do not delete LibreOffice extensions (reported by sebas22).
Specific to Linux
- Add packages for latest Fedora (32 and 33) and Ubuntu (20.04 and 20.10).
- Clean Chromium when installed as snap (reported by Martii).
- Fix KeyError: 'win10_theme' when switching visual themes (reported by Ashutosh-Kukreti, fixed by Max Khon).
- Fix: warning SyntaxWarning: 'is not' with a literal with Python version 3.8 (thanks to s-ankur).
- Fix: loop when maximizing window (reported by ediowar, fixed thanks to Max Kohn).
- Fix: dnf autoremove returned TypeError: a bytes-like object is required, not 'str' and left orphaned process (reported by terrycloth).
- Do not package the unneeded Winapp.py file (reported by terrycloth).
Specific to Windows
Bleachbit Reviews
- Add cleaner for Chromium-based Microsoft Edge (thanks to Max Khon).
- Fix: wiping special files returned TypeError: ord() or access denied (reported by David-Gonzalez1109 and WilliamBeltranC, fixed thanks to Max Khon).
- Fix: UnicodeDecodeError: 'charmap' codec can't decode byte [..] error when cleaning Google chrome (first reported by Robert51, fixed by Max Khoh).
- Fix: missing version number in executable metadata (reported by MusiqueGraeme, fixed by Max Khoh).
- Fix: do not install unwanted translation (first reported by MPet1, fixed by Max Khon).
- Fix: in the about dialog, the website button failed (reported by cliftonprince, fixed by Max Khon).
- Fix: all characters were shown as rectangles because of a font error (first reported by mayerthomas, fixed by Max Khon).
- Fix: OSError: [Errno 22] Invalid argument error when wiping free space (first reported by gator101, fixed by Max Khon).
- Fix: the menu option 'shred settings and quit' did not delete winapp2.ini (reported by ediowar, fixed by Max Khon).
- Fix: make deep scan case insensitive (fixed by Max Khon).
- Fix: delete gdbus-nonce-file temporary files (reported by Gitoffthelawn).
- Fix: error message AttributeError: 'gi.repository.Gtk' object has no attribute 'show_uri_on_window' on older Linux distributions such as Ubuntu 16.06 (reported by ediowar, fixed by Anatoli Babenia).
- Do not distribute unneeded fonts.
- Renew the code signing certificate (SHA256).
Bleachbit For Mac Installer
Download: BleachBit 4.2.0.1795 11.5 MB (Open Source)
Download: Portable BleachBit 4.2.0.1795 12.2 MB
View: BleachBit Home page
Bleachbit For Mac
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