# Chromium

Related articles

- Chromium tweaks
- Browser plugins
- Firefox
- Opera

Chromium is an open-source graphical web browser from Google, based on the Blink rendering engine.

## Installation

The open source project, Chromium, can be installed with the package chromium, available in the official repositories. In the AUR you can also find:

- chromium-dev - the development version (binary version: chromium-browser-bin)

The modified browser, Google Chrome, bundled with Flash Player and PDF Reader, can be installed with the package google-chrome, available in the AUR. In the AUR you can also find:

- google-chrome-beta - the beta version
- google-chrome-dev - the development version

Tip: 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.

### 32-bit systems predating SSE2

As of version 35 of chromium, support for older hardware without an SSE2 instruction set has been removed upstream. Users of old hardware still wishing to use chromium may build the chromium-no-sse2 package or download a pre-compiled package from Repo-ck#Miscellaneous_packages. Keep in mind that requiring SSE2 fixed several bugs, and you should not report issues encountered with this patched version upstream.

## Configuration

### Set Chromium as default browser

This behaviour is related to xdg-open: see xdg-open#Set the default browser. For more information about the topic in general, see Default applications.

### File associations

This behaviour is related to xdg-open: see xdg-open#Configuration. For more information about the topic in general, see Default applications.

### Flash Player plugin

Note: Chromium no longer supports the Netscape plugin API (NPAPI), so flashplugin from the repositories cannot be used.

pepper-flash is the Flash Player plugin, using the new Pepper plugin API. It is developed by Adobe, and distributed bundled with Google Chrome.

To install pepper-flash for Chromium, install chromium-pepper-flash from the AUR. If you want the development version, install chromium-pepper-flash-dev.

Enable the plugin in `chrome://plugins`.

### PDF viewer plugin

There are multiple ways of enabling PDF support in Chromium that are detailed below.

#### libpdf

libpdf is Google's own implementation of a PDF renderer included with Google Chrome. It is compatible with Chromium.

To install libpdf for Chromium, install chromium-libpdf from the AUR. If you want the development version, install libpdf-dev.

Enable the plugin in `chrome://plugins`.

#### PDF.js

See the main article: Browser plugins#PDF.js

### Print preview

The print preview feature is disabled by default in Chromium, unlike Google Chrome. Enabling it requires passing `--enable-print-preview` with the #PDF viewer plugin installed.

### 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 tweaks

## Troubleshooting

### Constant freezes under KDE

Uninstall libcanberra-pulse. See: BBS#1228558.

### Cracking Sound

There have been reports of cracking sound with chromium over hdmi audio. Start chromium with a different audio buffer size to fix the issue:

    $ chromium --audio-buffer-size=2048

### 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 in Flash Player and the browser

Warning: Disabling the rendering list may cause unstable behaviour; see the bug reports in `chrome://gpu`.

First, make sure you have all the required packages as explained in VDPAU. Then, to force 3D rendering enable the flag "Override software rendering list" in `chrome://flags`. Check if it is working in `chrome://gpu`.

### mailto links opened in new tab

If you do not use any DE, you might encounter the issue that all mailto links are opened in a new browser instance instead of your default email client. In this case you might need to use the following workaround by modifying `/usr/bin/xdg-email` which is called by Chromium:

     # sed 's/open_generic "${mailto}"/open_gnome "${mailto}"/' -i /usr/bin/xdg-email

This patch needs to be applied on every update of xdg-utils. If you want a persisting solution, you can install xdg-utils-xdg-email-gnome from the AUR.

### Proxy settings

As of June 2012, there are many situations in which proxy settings do not work properly, especially if set through the KDE interface. A working alternative is to use Chromium's command-line options, like `--proxy-pac-url` and `--proxy-server`, to set your proxy.

### speech-dispatcher dumps core

Note: This was reported as bug FS#38456.

Chromium installs speech-dispatcher as a dependency. The latter is an independent layer for speech synthesis interface and by default uses festival as its back end. If you are frequently receiving core dumps, it is likely caused by not having installed festival. To resolve the error message, either install festival or change the back end used by speech-dispatcher.

### WebGL

Chromium will sometimes disable WebGL with certain graphics card configurations. To remedy this, enter `chrome://flags` into the URL bar and disable the Disable WebGL flag. Alternatively, pass the command line flag `--enable-webgl` to Chromium in the terminal.

There is also the possibility that your graphics card has been blacklisted by Chromium. To override this use the go to `chrome://flags` and enable the Override software rendering list flag. Alternatively, pass the command line flag `--ignore-gpu-blacklist` to Chromium in the terminal.

If you're using Chromium with Bumblebee, WebGL might crash due to GPU sand-boxing. In this case, you can disable GPU sand-boxing with `optirun chromium --disable-gpu-sandbox`.

## See also

- Chromium homepage
- Google Chrome release notes
- Chrome web store
- Differences between Chromium and Google Chrome
- List of Chromium command-line switches

Category:

- Web Browser