Why does Chrome take up so much space on my Mac?

I was helping my girlfriend clear out space on her mac.

Step 1: see what’s taking up space

for this I used an awesome (free) app called Disk Inventory X

What I found out was that the largest file was a 12GB Chrome application.

That’s weird because the chrome on all of my machines is like 200MB tops.

So I used a lesser known trick of peeking inside the application to see what was going on.

You can see what an app is hiding by showing package contents

You can do this by right clicking on the app and selecting “show package contents”

(if you don’t see that you’re probably looking at a shortcut, select “options” then “reveal in finder” and try again on the icon that pops up in finder)

The culprit here was the versions folder

Inside the “contents” folder is a “versions” folder and inside of that folder is where I found 3 YEARS of chrome versions!

Versions dating back to May of 2013

Over 11 GB worth at almost 200 MB each

Step 2: DELETE

Deleting all but the newest version gave her back over 11GB of space!

I don’t know why the old versions don’t get deleted or how common this is, but if you’re running chrome on a mac it’s worth checking out.