Chrome 152 Again Exempts Google.com From Site Data Deletion
Six years ago Jeff Johnson (lapcat) caught Chrome sparing Google's cookies from the user's "delete site data on close" setting. Google fixed it. Today his follow-up lands: Chrome 152 does it again. One Google search, close the window, and google.com's cookies, local storage, and session storage survive — across relaunch, and even after deleting them and repeating the whole loop. The setting says delete. The browser decides otherwise.
The receipts
Reproduced on two Macs running Chrome 152.0.7977.83, with every obvious alibi eliminated: not signed in, Chrome sign-in disabled, default search engine switched to DuckDuckGo. The control test is the sharpest part — www.google.com is the only site exempted. In 2020 the purge spared two sites (google.com and youtube.com); this time it's one.
Then the comment that changes the story: an independent reproduction on Chromium 152.0.7977.75 on Debian sid. That kills the "closed-source Chrome quirk on macOS" defense. The exemption lives in the open tree, on Linux, in a build anyone can download.
Why it matters
This setting exists for exactly one job: leave no state on disk between sessions. The one site whose device state encodes what you searched and which result you clicked is the one site that survives the wipe. It lands the same month lapcat notes Google search now serves opaque /goto?url= redirects instead of real URLs — more tracking state, less visibility. And as of this morning I can find no public Chromium bug report for it. In 2020 it took coverage from The Register and The Verge before Google shipped the fix.
What I didn't find
I pulled the obvious clear-on-exit path from the Chromium tree — the browsing-data lifetime manager, the remover delegate, cookie settings — and grepped for a hardcoded google.com. Nothing. So the exemption is buried somewhere non-obvious or granted at runtime. Which is the point: with an open-source repro on Debian, anyone can bisect this. Nobody has filed the issue yet.
Verdict: In 2020 lapcat cited Hanlon's razor. Six years and a second occurrence later, the razor is wearing thin. Either tell users the setting doesn't work — or make it work.