Chromium

Chromium is Article description::the open source version of Google's web browser. It features a minimal user interface, powerful web development tools, and a built in task manager. The Chromium Project is at the forefront of implementing new web standards.

Because Chromium is open source it is legally unable to include several features that the proprietary Google Chrome browser includes by default. Namely automatic updates. A complete list of the differences can be found in the chromium repository.

L10N
There are many languages available via the   variable in Chromium. So many, in fact, that the wiki cannot display all of them. For a full list of localization languages run:

For more information on localization see the article.

Emerge
After setting USE flags as desired, Chromium with the following command:

Clang
To build Chromium with Clang, first see.

For Chromium specifically, the following env settings are needed:

Then enable it (note that we take the base Clang config from the other article, then add the settings we just defined):

HiDPI
Chromium's visual output is generally disconnected from a 's DPI scaling. It can be instructed to start in a scaled mode by using the  command-line option. This option can be passed a integer or decimal value. Standard scaling begins at 1.0. For example, to make Chromium's UI 1.5x larger:

A full list of command-line switches can be found here.

Native Wayland support
Since version 87, native support in Chromium can be enabled by passing the following options:

To set Chromium to start every time using the Wayland backend, append the following lines the user's Chromium configuration file:

Enable dark theme for pages (prefers-color-scheme)
Because of bug in May 2022 Chromium on GTK do not understand that user want to see dark pages. But you can set this preference manually:

First is for regular pages, the second is for internal chrome:// pages.

Disable Tab Hover Cards
Since version 91.0.4472.77 it is no longer possible to disable the Tab Hover Cards within Chrome flags. There seems to be no priority at Google to add this feature back in. In order to disable them, you can add this patch to Portage:

{{FileBox|filename=/etc/portage/patches/www-client/chromium/hover-card.patch|lang=diff|1= diff --git a/chrome/browser/ui/views/tabs/tab_strip.cc b/chrome/browser/ui/views/tabs/tab_strip.cc index 2c94eb0..1f7bde0 100644 --- a/chrome/browser/ui/views/tabs/tab_strip.cc +++ b/chrome/browser/ui/views/tabs/tab_strip.cc @@ -2149,6 +2149,7 @@ void TabStrip::OnMouseEventInTab(views::View* source, } void TabStrip::UpdateHoverCard(Tab* tab, HoverCardUpdateType update_type) { + return;   // Some operations (including e.g. starting a drag) can cause the tab focus   // to change at the same time as the tabstrip is starting to animate; the   // hover card should not be visible at this time. }}

See also Added setting for Tab Hover Cards.

Policies
It is possible to set specific policies for chromium. This can be useful especially if the browser should be accessible by users, but the content should be restricted to trusted sites. It can also be configured to restrict the access to specified URIs, like the  protocol, to prevent users from surfing the file system.

Chromium looks in for existing policies. There are two types of policies which can be defined:
 * managed
 * recommended

Generally managed policies are maintained by an administrator and recommended policies are recommended for users but not required. For further information about the two policy types the documentation should be referred on the Google Chrome support page.

The following example assumes managed policies. However, the procedure for recommended policies is very similar and can be found in the Chromium documentation.

Creating of managed policies
To set custom managed policies, a JSON file must be created in

The structure of the JSON file is the same for all chromium based browsers (Chrome, Chromium, Brave etc). An example JSON file could look like this:

This prevents the user from surfing on the file system using the file protocol, incognito mode, blocks the listed URIs and URLs, and the location and notifications. More settings, can be found in the policy list: https://www.chromium.org/administrators/policy-list-3/. If configured for other users as a service, it is recommended to block all sites at first and then define the allowed sites, to avoid abuse of the service. Please note that this only blocks the user from visiting specified locations. It does not disable the protocols on the system, so other applications must be configured separately.

If the policy was configured properly can be proofed on the special page:.

For a better structure, it is also possible to spread the policies over multiple JSON files. In this case it is indispensable to ensure that the same policy occurs only once per all files! If a policy is defined multiple times across the JSON files than the state of the policy will be undefined and it would be unclear which rule would be used!

Meaningful filenames and a simple grep across the files in case of doubt can help to prevent such misconfigurations.

Chrome URLs
Much like Firefox, Chromium has many internal Chrome URLs (special pages) that are used for additional configuration, troubleshooting, task management, etc. An exhaustive list of special pages can be accessed by navigating to:

Prominent special pages include:


 * - Shows enabled components and provides a button to check for updates for each of them. It is sometimes necessary to manually update the PPAPI Adobe flash module via this interfaces when using.
 * - Displays the About page which includes version information.
 * - A page to manage extensions.
 * - Enable/disable experimental features.
 * - Displays special information about the Adobe Flash Player (if it is accessible by Chromium).
 * - Displays information about use of graphics acceleration.
 * - Displays web history. Also accessible through the sandwich menu or by pressing +.
 * - Measure the memory usage of the browser and per-tab usage.
 * - Lots of information on network connections.
 * - Shows a list of plugins. Enable/disable them from this interface. (Deprecated in Chrome version 57 .)
 * - Displays more version information than the  page.

Tabs crash
Occasionally tabs in Chromium crash. This can be caused by quite a few things, however one of the most common reason for occurrence is that the system is running low on memory. On Gentoo, this can especially happen if the system is compiling a package update while running Chromium.

The command can be used to see how much memory is available on the system:

The solution to is to free up memory until the large package compiles have finished. Open a resource monitor of choice and kill applications using large amounts of memory.