Linux Chrome now with Flash & extensions (+adblock)

12 07 2009

The Linux version of Chrome has been coming along fairly quickly, the latest development build of Chrome (Chromium) for Linux now works with Flash and has extension support. It is also possible to configure the options (although there are still some TODO stubs so setting a proxy isn’t possible, EDIT: Try the –proxy-server argument). Tested under Ubuntu 9.04 64bit.

★ ☄ Sleepy kitten  ☆ ☽

★ ☄ Sweepy kitten. ☆ ☽

Update (05 Mar 2010): Google now have a proper version of Chrome with flash, themes, greasemonkey and extensions. Including .deb packages for Ubuntu (And packages for Debian, Fedora and OpenSUSE). Simply grab them from the the Chrome site, no other setup needed. They will also install repositories to keep things up to date. They are ‘beta’ but there more likely to be stable than grabbing the bleeding edge ones from the chromium-team repo (there is an ‘unstable’ packages too). I was running into issues with Chromium freezing up (mainly Flash related) which are not an issue with the official Google Chrome build.

There is also a fairly good Adblock extension. It includes the same filterlists as the Firefox one. If you need to block something extra hit ctrl+shit+k and you get a handy wizard where you can just click on whatever you want to nuke.

I also recommend giving the HTML5 version of YouTube a try. It seems faster than the flash one and things like seeking are quick. Full screen has a few issues. In order to activate it you need to first popout the video using the icon up the top right of the video, although it’s much faster to popout and Flash since it doesn’t need to rebuffer the video like Flash often does. I did have some sluggishness of the controls in full screen but the video playback works fine. Also for some reason it goes back to the Flash player when I am logged into YouTube with a user account, but works fine without a login.

Old instructions:
To install under Ubuntu:
sudo su
echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main #chromium-browser" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/chromium.list
sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 0xfbef0d696de1c72ba5a835fe5a9bf3bb4e5e17b5
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

To enable Flash support:
cd /usr/lib/chromium-browser/plugins
sudo ln -s ../../flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so

For extensions:
Start browser with the following:
chromium-browser --enable-plugins --enable-greasemonkey --enable-user-scripts --enable-extensions
Clink on a crx link (such as adsweep) and browse to chrome://extensions/ to check installation.