Over 2 gigabytes.

That's how much "cached data" I threw away this morning as I did my routine cleanup of web-browser caches. Despite using "private modes," aggressively using ad blockers to minimize exposure to rogue scripts, and despite of my browser's reassurance that "all web site data has been erased," this is obviously not the case.

Somewhere in the past few years, "the Internet" has de-evolved into a thing where privacy does not exist, and where you don't have control anymore over what was once called your "personal" computer.

I know that a reversal of this status quo must come, but I wonder when it will earnestly begin.

On one of the podcasts I listen to regularly--I think Sunday Morning Linux Review but it might have been Linux Voice or another one maybe Bad Voltage (I listen to a lot of podcasts)--I heard the rather appalling statistic that the average web page now downloads an amount of data measured on multiple megabytes, once all the embeds and images and ads have been delivered.

A web search turned up this: http://www.wired.com/2016/04/average...original-doom/

Sometimes I browse with w3m just for a break. (w3m is the only text browser I've found that offers tabbed browsing.)

Thats scary, I guess changing the cache size in the browser settings doesn't count for anything then?

hmm, my ~/.cache/mozilla is at 350MB right now, but i'm also using it right now.
~/.cache/brave is at 0, well done brave browser!
~/.cache/chromium is at 444kB, not too bad either (although i used it only once then uninstalled it again - oh, and chromium has another cache in ~/.config, that's at 2MB).
qupzilla 16k, slimjet 3MB, and ~/.cache/webkit has 64kB in it.

the complete cache folder is at 650MB.

~/.mozilla/firefox is 79MB

i think you're doing something wrong somewhere...

It's not "the cache." Most of it is local storage, it would seem.

Yes, I know that these are files accumulated by the browser, which the browser promises to have gotten rid of but which it did not and never does. I am not mistaken about anything.

How are you arriving at this figure? Mine are similar to ondoho's with the firefox directory being only 39.5MB.
I should point out that I browse permanently in privacy mode with only a couple of exceptions (this site being one).

so what are your preferences what FF should do with these files when it exits?

Did I say that I was using Firefox?

Many of the caches appear to have come from videos. Nevertheless, when the browser said that it was "deleting all information," it certainly didn't.

i'm sorry, i got that confused somewhere.
so what is this mysterious browser you are talking about?

OS/X Safari ... among various others ...

That makes sense then -- since when have Apple even suggested that they respect their customers' privacy or anything else about them for that matter?