Stop Google Chrome hoarding previous update versions?

Question

I use Google Chrome on a Windows 7 tablet with limited SSD space, which fills up quickly.

One irritating cause of lost disk space that I've established is, Google Chrome not only auto-updates frequently, it keeps all (or at least, 7 or 8 of) its previous versions in C:\Users\[me]\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application. Each version is a folder named by the Chrome version number. It doesn't take long for these to add up to gigabytes of lost disk space.

How can I force Chrome to not keep older versions, or, limit it to keeping just one or two? Is there any way to clear or purge old version of Chrome other than remembering to do irritating manual cleanups?

I would like to keep the auto-update on - I just want it to stop slowly eating my SSD.

Answer 1

There's a nifty tool called OldChromeRemover, which removes older versions of Chrome.

OldChromeRemover is a simple console program that checks for any redundant versions of Google Chrome left behind by the updater. It will quickly remove all except the newest version when prompted by the user, allowing you to free up valuable disk space.

I'd recommend using this in conjunction with the Windows task scheduler so that it periodically checks and removes old versions of Chrome.

Answer 2

I don’t know how long this behavior will continue or if it will being keeping them again, but at least for now (version ~24.0.1312.56), it wipes out old copies and keeps only one previous version.

In fact, you can examine Chrome's update log and see it specifically says it removes the previous verion(s).

^{(If I had any faith in the Chrome devs, I would say that the keep-everything behavior was a bug that has been fixed, but I think it may have more been evidence of their own doubt in their coding skills by avoiding pushing new, buggy versions on users without leaving the option of going back a version or two… or ten.)}