Cómo instalar el navegador Chrome en Ubuntu [Pasos sencillos]

 

Google chrome is a cross-platform web browser which considered as the best among other browsers. Chrome is not an open-source browser hence its not available on Ubuntu Software Center.

Where chromium is the open-source version of chrome which had fewer features. Chrome no longer supports 32-bit version, chromium browser currently supports 32 and 64 bit. Chrome supports a large number of extensions, prevent cross-site scripting vulnerabilities, DevTools, etc.

In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to install google chrome browser on Ubuntu 20.04. You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and other Debian distributions.

Here we discuss two methods, first will show the desktop GUI method which is very simple and secondly via terminal.

Install Chrome on Ubuntu from GUI

Installing google chrome from the graphical interface is the simplest method. I have taken screenshots to make it more simple to understand.

To proceed with the following steps make sure your computer has internet-connected.

01) Visit google chrome website and click ‘Download Chrome’:

02) Select your download package, this case I choose 64 bit .deb for Debian/Ubuntu, then click ‘Accept and Install button’:

03) A deb file will be downloaded to your ‘Downloads’ folder:

04) Right-click on the file and ‘Open with other Application’,

Note: In the previous version of Ubuntu you can double click on the file to start the installation. On Ubuntu 20.04 to fix this you can select file ‘Properties’ -> Choose ‘Open With’ tab -> select ‘Software Install’ and then click ‘Set as default’.

05) Select «Software Install» app:

06) Now click on the ‘Install’ button:

07) Provide your privileged user password to authenticate:

08) To start chrome press ‘Windows’ key and type ‘chrome’:

09) The first time it will prompt to choose whether you need google chrome to be your default browser:

10) Finally, you have chrome web browser ready to use:

Now time to import your bookmarks, add to favorite, and set your favorite backgrounds on chrome.

Install Chrome on Ubuntu from Terminal

First, download .deb file using wget file from the official website from the terminal and install it using the dpkg or apt-get.

Download deb file using wget command:

$ wget https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb

Using dpkg install .deb file:

$ sudo dpkg -i google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb

Or using apt-get command:

$ sudo apt-get install ./google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb

To start google chrome via terminal, run:

$ google-chrome

or to run chrome in background:

$ google-chrome &

Update Google Chrome

It advised to keep up to date with chrome updates as comes more security features, other improvements, and features.

The installation process will add a PPA to your system so Google Chrome will receive the latest updates automatically whenever you update your system via the Software Update tool.

You can verify that by checking the following file:

$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list

Output
### THIS FILE IS AUTOMATICALLY CONFIGURED ###
# You may comment out this entry, but any other modifications may be lost.
deb [arch=amd64] http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main

By Manually adding Google repositories

For the terminal centric users, you can install chrome browser by manually adding google repo. For doing this, create file named ‘google-chrome.list’ in the ‘/etc/apt/sources.list.d’ directory.

Type in terminal the following command:

$ sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list

Then and add the following content and save the file:

deb http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main

or use below one-liner:

$ sudo sh -c 'echo "deb [arch=amd64] http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list'

After adding google repository to your source file, you need to get repository key with the following command

$ wget -q -O - https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub | sudo apt-key add -

If all steps mentioned above are done, run:

$ sudo apt-get install google-chrome-stable

To update, you can run the same above command again when a new version available or update your system by the following command sudo apt-get update.

Note that you can also install beta and unstable versions of Chrome using the same repository. To do that use the following commands.

For beta:

$ sudo apt-get install google-chrome-beta

For unstable version of Chrome:

$ sudo apt-get install google-chrome-unstable

Uninstall Google Chrome

First, open the Terminal either using keyboard shortcut (Ctrl + Alt + T) or from the taskbar.

To remove google chrome from your system, type:

$ sudo apt remove google-chrome-stable

To clean up the package manager to ensure that there are no config files or dependencies packages, run:

$ sudo apt-get autoremove

Conclusion

All mentioned steps are not limited to Ubuntu operating system but should work on Linux Mint, elementary OS, Zorin OS other Ubuntu distributions.

I hope you enjoyed reading the installation steps of google chrome which is one of the best browsers in the World.