Use profile-cleaner to reduce the size of browser profiles by organizing their sqlite databases using sqlite3's vacuum and reindex functions. The term "browser" is used loosely since profile-cleaner happily works on some email clients and newsreaders too.
- Brave (stable, beta, dev and nightly) (https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/brave-bin)
- Chromium (stable, beta, and dev)
- Conkeror
- Edge
- Falkon
- Firefox (stable, beta, and aurora)
- Google-chrome (stable, beta, and dev)
- Heftig's version of Aurora (https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=117157)
- Icecat
- Icedove
- Inox (https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=198763)
- Librewolf
- Midori
- Newsboat
- Palemoon
- Qupzilla
- Seamonkey
- Thunderbird
- Tor-browser
- Vivaldi (stable and snapshot)
Consult the man page.
To build from source, see the included INSTALL text document.
Arch: in official repo
Fedora: in official repo
Gentoo: See instructions below
NixOS: in the official repo
Slackware: on slackbuilds
Profile cleaner is in the main repo:
emerge -av app-admin/profile-cleaner
If you are interested in packaging profile-cleaner for your favorite distro, please contact me.
- bash
- bc
- findutils
- sqlite
- parallel
Size before: 154.17 Mbytes
Size after: 99.11 Mbytes
$ profile-cleaner f
/home/facade/.mozilla/firefox/zee52krz.default/cookies.sqlite reduced by .87 Mbytes
/home/facade/.mozilla/firefox/zee52krz.default/signons.sqlite reduced by .41 Mbytes
/home/facade/.mozilla/firefox/zee52krz.default/downloads.sqlite reduced by .56 Mbytes
/home/facade/.mozilla/firefox/zee52krz.default/chromeappsstore.sqlite reduced by .03 Mbytes
/home/facade/.mozilla/firefox/zee52krz.default/urlclassifier3.sqlite reduced by 43.10 Mbytes
/home/facade/.mozilla/firefox/zee52krz.default/formhistory.sqlite reduced by .11 Mbytes
/home/facade/.mozilla/firefox/zee52krz.default/addons.sqlite reduced by 0 Mbytes
/home/facade/.mozilla/firefox/zee52krz.default/permissions.sqlite reduced by 0 Mbytes
/home/facade/.mozilla/firefox/zee52krz.default/content-prefs.sqlite reduced by 0 Mbytes
/home/facade/.mozilla/firefox/zee52krz.default/extensions.sqlite reduced by 0 Mbytes
/home/facade/.mozilla/firefox/zee52krz.default/webappsstore.sqlite reduced by 0 Mbytes
/home/facade/.mozilla/firefox/zee52krz.default/OfflineCache/index.sqlite reduced by 0 Mbytes
/home/facade/.mozilla/firefox/zee52krz.default/search.sqlite reduced by 0 Mbytes
/home/facade/.mozilla/firefox/zee52krz.default/places.sqlite reduced by 9.98 Mbytes
firefox profile reduced by 55.06 Mbytes
28-Nov-2012 Profile-cleaner has been rewritten to use GNU Parallel for processing.
Here is a contrived example cleaning 6 firefox profiles comparing the classical version of Profile-cleaner which used for loops to process profiles to the new version:
- There are a total of 312 M in the 6 "dirty" profiles.
- Test machine is an Intel 3770K @ 4.50 GHz.
- After cleaning there is a total of 213 M in the 6 "clean" profiles.
new 4.07s user 0.42s system 318% cpu 1.411 total
old 8.15s user 0.43s system 95% cpu 8.942 total
Your mileage may vary.