Popular browsers like Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, and Brave, to name a few, are all based on Chromium. Besides being completely open-source and devoid of any proprietary codecs, it is also the browser of choice by privacy-conscious people as it doesn’t send any tracking data back like with Google Chrome. We’ll be covering the installation of Chromium browser on Ubuntu 20 in this article. Note: this is different than Chromium headless.
Installing using Snap
Chromium browser is offered as a snap package by Canonical (the parent company behind Ubuntu). This can be done both from the graphical interface or the command line. On Ubuntu 20, to install Chromium using Snap, enter the following command in a Terminal prompt: This command will ensure all required dependencies for Chromium are downloaded and set up. Allow it to run a couple of minutes, and you should see an output confirming a successful installation.
Installing using APT
Another supported method to install Chromium on Ubuntu 20 is using theapt tool. As withsnap, installing using apt is also a simple two-step command (first command for refreshing apt repository data). In the backend, it does use the snapfacility. Here’s the output of the above commands on an Ubuntu 20 machine:
Launching Chromium
Chromium is now installed on your Ubuntu box. You can launch it from Activities search bar. Just type Chromium and click on the icon to launch the application.
You can use the “Address Bar” to search or visit any site or customize the browser with extensions or themes by visiting Chrome Webstore.
Summary
Chromium is the browser of choice for those who need a cutting-edge browser that supports all modern web features without privacy concerns and tracking by big corporations. It is available freely and can be installed in few simple steps on any operating system. We covered its setup on Ubuntu OS. I hope the steps covered in this article will help you try out Chromium.
