Did you notice? The winapp2.ini project quietly turned 15 years old on August 23 2025
To celebrate, I have completed a major overhaul to how winapp2.ini is built and maintained, with the hopes of lowering the barrier of entry.
One Monolithic File
winapp2.ini has been for many years, incomprehensibly large for the under initiated user. Submitting a change to GitHub has required modifying the 25000+ line ini file. Sometimes this has been made impossible through the web editor, leaving some users with no simple way to contribute. To allievate this problem, the set of application cleaning rules not specifically targeting web browsers has been broken into 27 smaller files. These files organize the entries that comprise winapp2.ini entirely alphabetically.
If you wish to contribute to winapp2.ini, please modify these small files! They remain small enough to be accessible through the web editor if that is your preference
Browser Monoliths
winapp2.ini has had something of a strange approach to web browser entries, informed largely by the way CCleaner categorizes and handles these browsers. As part of the pivot to non-ccleaner-as-default, I have created a system within winapp2ool called the Browser Builder. The Browser Builder takes in a small set of information about each type of web browser engine's (Chromium or Gecko) prescribed set of entries and the set of actively developed browsers using those engines and produces a bespoke entry for each web browser to the best of its ability.
There are some caveats to this, some browsers share User Data directory folders (such as Chromium and SRWare Iron). This makes it impossible to meaningfully delineate one from the other when both are installed. Nevertheless, all the browsers which are capable of it have had their cleaning entries separated from one another. This means no more "Chromium" entries that actually target 8 different Chromium based browsers. Each browser entry now cleans only the browser it is named for. As a result, there are ~700 new browser entries in winapp2.ini
The browser builder, by virtue of generating information from a broad scaffolding system, provides both over and undercoverage across its output. A new feature of winapp2ool has been implemented which helps with this. Winapp2ool now ships with a feature called Flavorize which applies a complex series of transmutations to an ini file. These include removals, replacements, and additions of entire sections or individual keys within them. These corrective rulesets are now part of the winapp2.ini generative pipeline and if you wish to make additions or removals to browser entries, you should consult these files. They live in the \Assember\BrowserBuilder folder in the main repo and are well documented!
It is worth noting for the end user that Browser Builder allows you to easily add support for browsers on your machine which are installed to non-default locations such as Portable Apps and persist this support across winapp2.in updates
Flavorize also allows us to create tool or OS-specific variants of winapp2.ini through this same system with relative ease. For example, to produce a CCleaner version of winapp2.ini, which has historically only removed content from the base file, we can now apply Flavorization using a set of files containing the information which needs to be changed, rather than manually maintaining a record of all such changes across time. This has been part of a longer term goal for this project which is now complete.
A build script has been provided requiring winapp2ool v1.6. It constructs the file from the separate base entry files and the browser builder input and should be usable with a single click by anyone wishing to produce and updated copy of winapp2.ini carrying their changes.
Winapp2ool changes
Winapp2ool itself has had to evolve a substantial amount during this time to accommodate these changes. It is still in many ways in a state of flux. You may notice that some menus have been re-arranged or re-designed, or that some modules provide output only when they complete their work when they used to provide it during. An example of a known issue is the now-inconsistent menu header coloring. This is a result of being between output systems and will be progressively resolved in future releases. Please report any crashes, errors, or bugs you encounter while using winapp2ool.
Full Changelog: V1.5...v1.6