Chromium is an open-source graphical web browser based on the Blink rendering engine. It is the basis for the proprietary Google Chrome browser.
Installation
The open-source project, Chromium, can be installed with the chromium-browser package.
The derived browser, Google Chrome, which automatically installs Flash Player and Widevine EME (for e.g. Netflix), can be installed with the google-chrome-stable package.
See these two articles for an explanation of the differences between Chromium and Chrome.
On top of the different Chromium build channels, a number of forks exist with more or less special features; see List of applications#Blink-based.
Configuration
Default applications
To set Chromium as the default browser and to change which applications Chromium launches when opening downloaded files, see default applications.
Flash Player plugin
Flash Player is automatically installed when using Google Chrome.
To install it for Chromium, install the pepperflashplugin-nonfree package.
Make sure Flash is allowed to run in chrome://settings/content/flash.
Widevine Content Decryption Module plugin
Widevine is Google's Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) Content Decryption Module (CDM). It is used to watch premium video content such as Netflix. It is automatically installed when using Google Chrome.
PDF viewer plugin
Chromium and Google Chrome are bundled with the Chromium PDF Viewer plugin. If you don't want to use this plugin, check Open PDFs using a different application in chrome://settings/content/pdfDocuments.
Certificates
Chromium uses Network Security Services for certificate management. Certificates can be managed in chrome://settings/certificates.
Tips and tricks
See the main article: Chromium/Tips and tricks.
Troubleshooting
Fonts
Note: Chromium does not fully integrate with fontconfig/GTK/Pango/X/etc. due to its sandbox. For more information, see the
Linux Technical FAQ.
Font rendering issues in PDF plugin
To fix the font rendering in some PDFs one has to install the fonts-liberation package, otherwise the substituted font causes text to run into other text.
Font rendering issues of UTF characters
UTF characters may render as boxes (e.g. simplified Chinese characters). Installing fonts-liberation will allow for the characters to be rendered as expected.
Tab font size is too large
Chromium will use the GTK settings as described in GTK+#Configuration. When configured, Chromium will use the gtk-font-name setting for tabs (which may mismatch window font size). To override these settings, use --force-device-scale-factor=1.0.
Force GPU acceleration
Warning: Disabling the rendering blacklist may cause unstable behavior, including crashes of the host. See the bug reports in chrome://gpu.
To force GPU acceleration, enable the flags: "Override software rendering list", "GPU rasterization", "Zero-copy rasterizer" in chrome://flags. Check if it is working in chrome://gpu. This may also alleviate tearing issues with the radeon driver.
If "Native GpuMemoryBuffers" under chrome://gpu mentions software rendering, you additionally need to pass the --enable-native-gpu-memory-buffers flag, or some optimizations (like the zero-copy rasterizer) won't do anything. This flag isn't available under chrome://flags - it must be passed in either the chromium-flags.conf file (as noted in Chromium/Tips and tricks#Making flags persistent) or directly on the command line.
WebGL
There is the possibility that your graphics card has been blacklisted by Chromium. See #Force GPU acceleration.
If you are using Chromium with Bumblebee, WebGL might crash due to GPU sandboxing. In this case, you can disable GPU sandboxing with optirun chromium --disable-gpu-sandbox.
Visit chrome://gpu/ for debugging information about WebGL support.
Chromium can save incorrect data about your GPU in your user profile (e.g. if you use switch between an Nvidia card using Optimus and Intel, it will show the Nvidia card in chrome://gpu even when you're not using it or primusrun/optirun). Running using a different user directory, e.g, chromium --user-data-dir=$(mktemp -d) may solve this issue. For a persistent solution you can reset the GPU information by deleting ~/.config/chromium/Local\ State.
Zoomed-in GUI
Chromium's graphical interface will sometimes automatically scale for HiDPI displays. To disable this, use --force-device-scale-factor=1.
Password prompt on every start with GNOME Keyring
See GNOME/Keyring#Passwords are not remembered.
Chromecasts in the network are not discovered
You will need to enable the Media Router Component Extension in chrome://flags/#load-media-router-component-extension.
Losing cookies and passwords when switching between desktop environments
If you see the message Failed to decrypt token for service AccountId-* in the terminal when you start Chromium, it might try to use the wrong password storage backend. This might happen when you switch between Desktop Environments.
See Chromium/Tips and tricks#Force a password store.
Hang on startup when Google Sync enabled
Try launching Chrome with --password-store=basic or another appropriate password store.
See Chromium/Tips and tricks#Force a password store.
See also
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