If you’re looking to maintain your browsing privacy then there are plenty of tools that can offer at least some help, by deleting your internet history, cookies and cached files on demand.

This is a surprisingly difficult task to do well, though, and many of these utilities fall short of what most people really need. Browser support can be poor, for instance; the tool may not be as thorough as it claims, and typically you’ll get little control over the cleanup process.

There are occasional exceptions, though, and Web Browsers Traces Eraser in particular stands out from the crowd. The program doesn’t just work with IE, Firefox, and Chrome, for instance. It’ll also clean your internet tracks in Opera, Safari, Avant Browser, ChromePlus, Flock, K-Meleon, Lunascape 6, Netscape, Pale Moon, QtWeb, SeaMonkey and the Chromium-based SRWare Iron.

The program doesn’t only delete your browser cookies, cached files, internet and download history, either. It’s smart enough to wipe your Flash cookies and history, Java cache, temp directory and other leftovers.

Simply wiping everything can be annoying, as for example you’ll probably find you have to re-enter your logon details at many password-protected sites. But Web Browsers Traces Eraser helps here, too, by allowing you to maintain an Exclusion List of information you don’t want to be deleted. So if you’d like to keep your Amazon cookie, say, just right-click it, select Add Item to Exclusions, and that’s it – the file won’t be touched in future.

And better still, Web Browsers Traces Eraser manages to squeeze all this power into a tiny installation (around 350KB, unzipped), which is also portable, so you can carry it around on a USB key and maintain your internet privacy on whatever PC you happen to be using.

Of course if you only need support for cleaning the main browsers then CCleaner remains a better option. It allows you to wipe more information (including Autocomplete form history), and clears your tracks in Windows and many other applications.

But if you’re primarily interested in cleaning the most common web tracks, and can use the programs wide browser support, then Web Browsers Traces Eraser is a good specialist alternative. The latest version, 1.3, was released yesterday, features many improvements and new features, and is available now.