Chromium
Related articles
Chromium is an open-source graphical web browser from "The Chromium Project", based on the Blink rendering engine.
Installation
The open-source project, Chromium, can be installed with the chromium package.
Other alternatives include:
- Chromium Beta Channel — the beta version
- https://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/ || not packaged? search in AUR
- Chromium Dev Channel — the development version
- Chromium snapshot builds — the untested nightly version
- Chromium with VA-API support — with a patch to enable VA-API
The derived browser, Google Chrome, bundled with Flash Player and Widevine EME (for e.g. Netflix), can be installed with the google-chromeAUR package.
Other alternatives include:
- Google Chrome Beta Channel — the beta version
- Google Chrome Dev Channel — the development version
See these two articles for an explanation of the differences between Stable/Beta/Dev, as well as Chromium vs. Chrome and an explanation of the version numbering.
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
Pepper Flash is the Flash Player plugin, using the new Pepper plugin API. It is included with Google Chrome. To install it for Chromium, install it the pepper-flashAUR package.
Make sure the plugin is enabled in chrome://plugins
and restart Chromium via its menu.
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 comes bundled with Chrome.
To install the Widevine CDM for Chromium, install the chromium-widevineAUR package.
Make sure the plugin is enabled in chrome://plugins
.
PDF viewer plugin
Chromium and Google Chrome are bundled with the Chromium PDF Viewer plugin, so installing a third-party plugin is not required.
If you prefer another implementation, disable the Chromium PDF Viewer plugin in chrome://plugins
, and install one of the following alternatives:
PDF.js
See the main article: Browser plugins#PDF.js
Certificates
Chromium uses NSS for certificate management. Certificates can be managed in Settings
→ Show advanced settings...
→ Manage Certificates...
.
Tips and tricks
See the main article: Chromium/Tips and tricks.
Troubleshooting
Constant freezes under KDE
Uninstall libcanberra-pulse. See: BBS#1228558.
Fonts
Font rendering issues in PDF plugin
To fix the font rendering in some PDFs one has to install the ttf-liberation package, otherwise the substituted font causes text to run into other text. This was reported on the chromium bug tracker by an Arch user.
Force 3D acceleration
First follow Hardware video acceleration. Then, to force 3D rendering, enable the flag "Override software rendering list" in chrome://flags
. Check if it is working in chrome://gpu
. This may also alleviate tearing issues with the radeon driver.
WebGL
There is the possibility that your graphics card has been blacklisted by Chromium. See #Force 3D 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
.
If none of the above solves your problem, you may be able to visit chrome://gpu/
for additional debugging info.
Distorted GUI
Chromium's graphical interface may look unsightly, distorted and zoomed in on high-DPI displays. To disable any attempts to scale display according to device DPI, use --force-device-scale-factor=1
.
Disable keyring password prompt
See GNOME/Keyring#Passwords are not remembered. You may also need to edit the Chromium command line to append --password-store=gnome
.