this post was submitted on 20 May 2026
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Show is better than tell:
Often, when viewing images, firefox "caches" the image in order to be able to load it faster when visiting that site again. Left unchecked, this cache (of images and other assets) can pretty much infinitely grow. Many other apps also have big caches.
Bleachbit actually is useful. Instead of hunting through your system and accidentally rm -rfing the wrong folder and losing all your precious firefox profile data, it enables you to quickly nuke all caches, freeing up a significant amount of space. I would probably free up 15gb+ if I ran it based on these images.
EDIT: just ran it. I freed up 6gb of space. Not 15gb. Huh. Still, pretty good though, and if you are space starved (I used to use a machine with only 32 gb of storage TOTAL), then it's useful to keep things slim.
Why trust this tool over the browser itself, all of which have options to control their own caches?
My thoughts, too. CTRL-SHIFT-DEL
Cuz there are more than just browser caches I would like to nuke.
Cuz bleachbit is more granular, seperating out site data and cookies, enabling me to delete the 1gb alpine docker image downloaded by https://github.com/MercuryWorkshop/anuraOS without logging me out of anything that is using cookies. Firefox doesn't appear to have that option.
Edit: cuz I use multiple browser profiles, and this can delete cache from all of them at once instead of me having to do it once per profile 2-3 times.
Because the browser was just an example, this tool handles a lot of different softwares. Sometimes it can even be software you deleted that left cache behind.
I trust this tool as it has been around for a very long time, is well known and open source. But I haven't used it in years as drive space is now cheap so I'm not trying to reclaim every last bit of it. It can still be useful in some situations but no need to use it regularly.
Other software has similar behavior and this could do the same thing for, conceivably, all of them.
I could see a world where I would run something like this every 5 years and be surprised how much crap just accumulated over that time.