Is there anyway to stop Chrome on Android from caching webpages? If not is there either another browser that will allow this or a way to achieve the same functionality?
1 Answer
need root
go to "/data/data/com.android.chrome"
rename "cache" dir something else i.e "cache2"
create a symlink named "cache" in that folder pointing to somewhere else or null
done
I actually point the symlink to a newly created dir in the /storage partition. It gets erased every time you reboot (not with soft/hot-(re)boot). Since Chrome and other app cache can grow several hundred megabytes, I chose /storage partition so I can save space on user partition. I did the trick even with Twitter app, Maps app and other apps that grow very large cache size.
These newly created dir must have set permission 771 and owner and group set to Chrome UID (10057 in my case).
I put a 11cachescript.sh into /system/etc/init.d/ to set up these folder at startup.
#!/system/bin/sh
mkdir -m 771 /storage/cache
mkdir -m 771 /storage/cache/chrome
chown 10057:10057 /storage/cache/chrome
You can also point the symlink to a non existing folder, Chrome will still work but will not save cache file anywhere. If you don't use a script like above, next reboot symlink will point to a non-existent dir, but still work.
You can delete everything inside "cache2" folder, there can be hundreds of megabytes in there!