Install Chromium Web Browser on Ubuntu 20.04 or Ubuntu-based distributions

Vishnu Damwala

Last updated on Nov 2, 2020 2 min read

Chromium is an open-source browser project backing Google’s Chrome browser. Many modern browsers are built on Chromium.

Even Microsoft latest Edge browser released on January 15^th, 2020 has been built from scratch using Chromium as a new foundation. So they planned to switch to Chromium after the huge popularity and success of Chromium-based browsers.

Few browsers based on Chromium projects as of writing this article on 31^st, October 2020 are -

Chromium project is an open-source project managed by Google. Chromium does not include proprietary web codecs. As well as Google handles crash reports and usage tracks with Google Chrome based on Chromium.

The Chromium browser is an excellent option for open-source applications.

In this article we will see two different ways of installing an open-source Chromium browser on Ubuntu 20.04 and other few Ubuntu-based distributions are as follows:

Chromium can be installed via the Snapcraft store as a snap package or with apt.

Installing as a Snap Package

Canonical manages and distributes the Chromium snap package, the one behind Ubuntu.

Snap packages are easy to upgrade and secure as Snaps are self-contained software packages. It includes all dependencies needed to run an application.

Snap packages can be installed either from Ubuntu Software application or via command-line.

Using Terminal

Open your terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run the below command with sudo privileges

sudo snap install chromium

This command will install the latest chromium and other dependencies too. The snap package will automatically update(in the background) whenever a new version of Chromium is released.

We can also install from Ubuntu Software, search for Chromium and install the application.

Installing with apt

Chromium deb is already available in the default Ubuntu repositories.

Using Terminal

Open your terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run the below command with sudo privileges

sudo apt update && sudo apt install chromium-browser -f

This command will install the latest chromium and other dependencies too fixing broken packages. It can be updated through the command-line or your Software Update tool

Run application

Once the installation is done, we can now run Chromium from application launcher.

We’ll see the default Chromium welcome page when the browser starts for the first time.

Hope you like this!

Keep helping and happy 😄 coding