Chromium
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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
- Chromium with GTK+ 3 — built with gtk3 instead of gtk2
The derived browser, Google Chrome, bundled with 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
The Flash Player plugin, using the new Pepper plugin API.
To install it for Chromium or Chrome, install the pepper-flashAUR package.
Add the following line (replace the version with the latest one) to ~/.config/chrome-dev-flags.conf
.
--ppapi-flash-path=/usr/lib/PepperFlash/libpepflashplayer.so --ppapi-flash-version=25.0.0.171
Make sure Flash is allowed to run in chrome://settings/content
.
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.
To install it for Chromium, install the chromium-widevineAUR package.
Make sure Allow sites to play protected content is checked in chrome://settings/content
.
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, check Open PDF files in the default PDF viewer application at the bottom of chrome://settings/content
, and install one of the alternatives from Browser plugins#PDF viewer.
Certificates
Chromium uses NSS for certificate management. Certificates can be managed in chrome://settings/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 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 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
.
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
.
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
.
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
.