We all know that Google likes to tinker with the layout and design of the company's Chrome browser. While the company won't touch the actual interface much, it started to introduce material design changes to the browser some time ago.

The last release version of Google Chrome changed the bookmarks interface for instance to material design.

If you open the Clear Browsing Data dialog on Chrome right now, you will notice that it was changed as well recently by the company.

You can open the menu in multiple ways, one of the quickest options is to load chrome://settings/clearBrowserData in the web browser's address bar.

Chrome Basic and Advanced clear browsing data

You will notice that Google separates using tabs now. There is a basic and advanced tab that differ in regards to the items that you can clear in the browser.

The default basic tab lets you clear the browsing history, cookies and other site data, and cached images and files. You do get the time range selector at the top, but no other options besides those mentioned.

You need to switch to the advanced tab to display all options again. There you find listed options to clear the download history, passwords, autofill form data, site settings, hosted app data, and media licenses.

The advanced items reveal additional information on top of that. The number of items that will be removed if you clear the data is listed next to each item on the advanced tab. Only the cache size is listed on the basic tab.

Chrome remembers the last tab and will open it for as long as you don't switch to the other tab. That's good news for advanced users who want more control over the clearing of data in the web browser.

Closing Words

Google has not revealed why it decided to create a basic clear browsing data dialog and add it to the browser. The advanced dialog is the one that Chrome users have used ever since the first iteration of the browser was released by Google.

If I had to guess, Google made the change to prevent that users clear data that they need accidentally.