How to Install Chromium Browser on Ubuntu 20?

Chromium is an open-source browser project for the modern web that, besides being a full-fledged browser itself, serves as the backend engine for many of the popular browsers in the market.

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:

$ sudo snap install chromium

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.

$ sudo snap install chromium
chromium 94.0.4606.71 from Canonical* installed
$

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.

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install chromium-browser

Here’s the output of the above commands on an Ubuntu 20 machine:

$ sudo apt update
Hit:1 http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal InRelease
Hit:2 http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal-updates InRelease
Hit:3 http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal-backports InRelease
Get:4 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal-security InRelease [114 kB]
Fetched 114 kB in 2s (64.8 kB/s)
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
6 packages can be upgraded. Run 'apt list --upgradable' to see them.
$

$ sudo apt install chromium-browser
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra gstreamer1.0-vaapi libgstreamer-plugins-bad1.0-0 libva-wayland2
Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove them.
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  chromium-browser
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 6 not upgraded.
Need to get 48.3 kB of archives.
After this operation, 164 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal-updates/universe amd64 chromium-browser amd64 1:85.0.4183.83-0ubuntu0.20.04.2 [48.3 kB]
Fetched 48.3 kB in 0s (903 kB/s)
Preconfiguring packages ...
Selecting previously unselected package chromium-browser.
(Reading database ... 193368 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../chromium-browser_1%3a85.0.4183.83-0ubuntu0.20.04.2_amd64.deb ...
=> Installing the chromium snap
==> Checking connectivity with the snap store
==> Installing the chromium snap
chromium 94.0.4606.71 from Canonical* installed
=> Snap installation complete
Unpacking chromium-browser (1:85.0.4183.83-0ubuntu0.20.04.2) ...
Setting up chromium-browser (1:85.0.4183.83-0ubuntu0.20.04.2) ...
Processing triggers for mime-support (3.64ubuntu1) ...
Processing triggers for hicolor-icon-theme (0.17-2) ...
Processing triggers for gnome-menus (3.36.0-1ubuntu1) ...
Processing triggers for desktop-file-utils (0.24-1ubuntu3) ...
$

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.