Tired of watching Chrome get slower and slower every day? If you are like me, you fell in love with it’s clean, simple design philosophy and the ecosystem around it (Extensions, Apps, etc) but let’s be honest, it truly is about the speed! The slowness was largely limited to the Omnibox but also seemed to plague File Open dialog in Chrome which lead me down the road of thinking it was a problem with Chrome and my SSD drive.
According to Make Use Of blog, the folder %localappdata%\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default is the key to the problem. I’ve uninstalled, re-installed, turned off extenstions and apps, deleted caches; all to no avail. I was about to put a bullet in this ol’ dog until I stumbled on this article. I gave it a shot and it fixed it, with a few caveats.
Some things to consider when deleting the files in the folder above:
- Bookmarks – In the folder, there is a file called Bookmarks that contains, not surprisingly, all of your bookmarks. Deleting all this data ’cause my collection of bookmarks and bookmarklets to disapear. Oddly enough, even logging into Chrome didn’t return them from my profile (wonder if they were just local and I hadn’t previously been logged into Chrome) so I went digging through the trash to see if I could find the file. I closed Chrome, restored the file from the trash and then reloaded chrome and my Bookmarks are now back. (Note that it took a little while after signing in but extensions started showing up shortly so perhaps had I been more patient, this step would not have been necessary.)
- Web Apps – Similarly, all of my Chrome Apps were gone so I went looking for a similarly named file or folder to restore. I tried Web Applications and that didn’t seem to resolve the problem. However, within 5 minutes or so of signing in the apps appeared back where they belonged
So, if you truly do want to reset your Chrome Clock back to day one, go ahead and delete the whole folder. If you want the most seamless experience when you re-open it and you haven’t previously logged into Chrome with your primary account, go ahead and do so now so that after you “nuke it from orbit”, you can restore the settings that you want.
Anyone else been frustrated to no end by Chrome over time? Let me know in the comments below.
Image courtesy of Elliot Brown at Flickr used under CC BY 2.0
At Over The Top and Exhibit A Communications, I've programmed solutions for Google as well as at least one other company that was later acquired by Google.
I've been CTO of an Internet SaaS company and spent my time pretty evenly between guiding the future technical strategy of the company, architecting software solutions for my dev teams, designing and running a data center to service our clients world-wide as well as being a technical evangalist/sales engineer to our media clients large and small.
I've also been Chief Photographer of the Daily Sun/Post newspaper back when it was a 5-day a week daily newspaper.
I also spent a great many years as a beach lifeguardfor the City of San Clemente as well as Jr. Lifeguard instructor and then as it's program coordinator.
Bragging rights
Private Pilot with Instrument rating and proud husband of soon to be 25 years (and counting).
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