DownSweep

Automatically clear Chrome download history entries after a chosen retention period (files on disk are kept).

DownSweep is a minimal Chrome extension that automatically clears entries from your download history. It only removes records from chrome://downloads — the actual files on your disk are never touched. Safe by design. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Key features ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ • Scheduled auto-clean: entries older than your retention window (in minutes, hours, or days) are erased on a periodic sweep • One-click clear: a single button in the popup wipes the entire history immediately • Post-download nudge: a delayed sweep fires after each download completes, so short retention windows stay accurate • Smart scheduling: sweep cadence auto-scales to your retention length — negligible impact on performance • Cross-device sync: settings roam via your Chrome account • Light & dark mode: follows your system theme automatically ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Privacy & permissions ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ DownSweep sends no data anywhere. No network requests. No analytics. No tracking. Ever. It requests only the three permissions it actually needs: • downloads — to read and erase history entries • storage — to save your preferences • alarms — to schedule the background sweep No host permissions. No content scripts injected into any web page you visit. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Who it's for ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ • People who care about privacy and don't want a long trail of downloads • Anyone sharing a computer with others • Tidiness enthusiasts who like chrome://downloads to stay clean • Users who forget to clear history manually and want it handled ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Open source ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Source code: https://github.com/RitterHou/DownSweep Issues and feature requests welcome.