Use the chrome.experimental.clear module to remove browsing data from a user's local profile. This module is still experimental. For more information regarding the usage of experimental APIs, see the chrome.experimental.* APIs page.

Manifest

You must declare the "clear" permission in the extension manifest to use this API. As the API is still experimental, you must declare the "experimental" permisson as well.

{
  "name": "My extension",
  ...
  "permissions": [
    "clear",
    "experimental"
  ],
  ...
}

Usage

This API provides a time-based mechanism for clearing a user's browsing data. Your code should provide a timestamp which indicates the historical date after which the user's browsing data should be removed. This timestamp is formatted as the number of milliseconds since the Unix epoch (which can be retrieved from a JavaScript Date object via the getTime method).

For example, to clear all of a user's browsing data from the last week, you might write code as follows:

var callback = function () {
  // Do something clever here once data has been removed.
};

var millisecondsPerWeek = 1000 * 60 * 60 * 24 * 7;
var oneWeekAgo = (new Date()).getTime() - millisecondsPerWeek;
chrome.experimental.clear.browsingData(oneWeekAgo, {
  "appcache": true,
  "cache": true,
  "cookies": true,
  "downloads": true,
  "fileSystems": true,
  "formData": true,
  "history": true,
  "indexedDB": true,
  "localStorage": true,
  "pluginData": true,
  "passwords": true,
  "webSQL": true
}, callback);

The chrome.experimental.clear.browsingData method allows you to remove various types of browsing data with a single call, and will be much faster than calling multiple more specific methods. If, however, you only want to clear one specific type of browsing data (cookies, for example), the more granular methods offer a readable alternative to a call filled with JSON.

var callback = function () {
  // Do something clever here once data has been removed.
};

var millisecondsPerWeek = 1000 * 60 * 60 * 24 * 7;
var oneWeekAgo = (new Date()).getTime() - millisecondsPerWeek;
chrome.experimental.clear.cookies(oneWeekAgo, callback);

Important: Removing browsing data involves a good deal of heavy lifting in the background, and can take tens of seconds to complete, depending on a user's profile. You should use the callback mechanism to keep your users up to date on the removal's status.

Examples

Samples for the clear API are available on the samples page.