How-to · Privacy
How to auto-delete cookies except a whitelist in Chrome
Die kurze Antwort
Use an MV3-native cleaner: set the default action to "clean on close", then whitelist the domains you trust. Cookies for everything else are deleted seconds after you close the tab — with an activity log so the cleanup is never a black box.
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Install CookieVault Guardian — it defaults to "allow", so nothing is deleted until you opt in.
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In the popup, set the global default action to "clean on close".
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Add allow rules for the domains you trust — wildcards like *.example.com cover sub-domains.
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Optionally enable "also clear site data" to wipe localStorage and IndexedDB along with cookies.
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Check the activity log to see exactly what got cleaned, and when.
The workflow privacy power users ran for a decade — keep cookies for the handful of sites you trust, delete everything else automatically — lost its standard tools when Chrome moved to Manifest V3. Cookie AutoDelete was disabled by the switch, Cookiebro stopped receiving updates, and EditThisCookie was delisted. The good news: the pattern itself works fine under MV3. It just needs a tool built for it.
Install a Guardian-style cleaner
CookieVault Guardian is an MV3-native rebuild of the auto-delete workflow: open source under the MIT license, local-only, with no analytics or telemetry. Install it and open the popup — by default it deletes nothing, so setting it up is deliberate rather than destructive.
Set the global default to "clean on close"
The core of the whitelist model is one setting: make clean on close the default action. From then on, when you close the last tab of a domain, its cookies are deleted within seconds. A 30-second background sweep re-checks the cookie store as a safety net, so a missed tab event never leaves stale cookies behind.
Whitelist the sites you trust
Add an allow rule for each domain whose logins you want to keep — your mail, your bank, the sites you actually use daily. Patterns support wildcards, so *.example.com covers every sub-domain in one rule. Each rule takes one of three actions: allow (the whitelist), clean on close, or clean immediately for domains that should never keep anything.
Verify the cleanup in the activity log
Most auto-delete tools work silently and leave you guessing. Guardian keeps a recent-activity log of cleanup events with timestamps, stored locally and never uploaded — open the popup and you can see exactly which cookies were removed and when. There's also a login-protection safety net: cookies that look like active session cookies aren't auto-deleted unless you explicitly say so, so routine cleanup doesn't log you out mid-task.
Optionally clear site data too
Cookies aren't the only place sites persist state. If you turn on "also clear site data", Guardian requests the browsingData permission at that moment (it's optional, not part of the install) and additionally clears the cleaned origin's localStorage, IndexedDB, caches and service workers.
Why this beats "clear cookies on exit"
Chrome's built-in "clear cookies when you close all windows" is all-or-nothing: it logs you out of everything, once per browser session. The whitelist model is per-domain and continuous — trusted sites stay logged in indefinitely, everything else is cleaned the moment you're done with it. If you also want to inspect or hand-edit what's in the jar, that's the sibling extension's job — see how to edit cookies in Chrome.