Chrome

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Chrome is Google's proprietary (closed source) web browser. Much of the source code is released in parallel as Chromium, however there are binary blobs present in Chrome including a Pepper-based version PPAPI of the Adobe Flash Player.

Installation

Currently there are several versions of Google Chrome available in the main Gentoo repository:

• www-client/google-chrome - A stable version of the web browser from Google.
• www-client/google-chrome-beta - A beta version of the web browser of Google.
• www-client/google-chrome-unstable - An unstable version of the web browser from Google.

USE flags

Each of the packages listed above contains the following USE flags:

USE flags for www-client/google-chrome The web browser from Google

qt6	Add support for the Qt 6 application and UI framework
selinux	!!internal use only!! Security Enhanced Linux support, this must be set by the selinux profile or breakage will occur

Data provided by the Gentoo Package Database · Last update: 2025-07-01 07:17 More information about USE flags

Accept License

In order to install Google Chrome, the user needs to accept the 'google-chrome' license agreement. A copy of the license can be found at '/var/db/repos/gentoo/licenses/google-chrome'. Read with:

user $less /var/db/repos/gentoo/licenses/google-chrome

And to agree:

root #echo "www-client/google-chrome google-chrome" >> /etc/portage/package.license

Emerge

Select one of the Chrome packages to emerge above. Here the primary stable Chrome package will be installed:

root #emerge --ask www-client/google-chrome

Configuration

Most configuration aspects can be found in the Chromium article. Head over there for configuration information.

Screensharing with Pipewire

Change 'WebRTC PipeWire support' to 'Enabled' in chrome://flags

Using Wayland backend

Change 'Preferred Ozone platform' to 'Wayland' in chrome://flags. If need more customization, such as adding fcitx support, edit the corresponding desktop file, modify entries like Exec=/usr/bin/google-chrome-stable %U to Exec=/usr/bin/google-chrome-stable --ozone-platform-hint=auto --enable-wayland-ime --wayland-text-input-version=1 %U.

Using IM

Chrome needs to be instructed to use gtk4 in order to use IM such as fcitx5.

user $google-chrome-stable --gtk-version=4

Policies

To configure custom policies in Chrome, the policy section in the Chromium article can be used: Chromium#Policies.

However, please note that the directory where Google Chrome looks for policies can be slightly different. According to the documentation the lookup path for installed policies should be: /etc/opt/chrome/policies

No emojis?

Emerge media-fonts/noto-emoji.

Troubleshooting

Last open pages not restored with info: "Google Chrome didn't shut down correctly"

Systemd

1. Create a service file with your favourite editor:
   FILE /etc/systemd/system/kill-chrome-gracefully.service

   [Unit]
   Description=Help Chrome close gracefully
   DefaultDependencies=no
   Before=shutdown.target
   
   [Service]
   Type=oneshot
   User=root
   Group= root
   ExecStart=killall chrome --wait
   
   [Install]
   WantedBy=halt.target reboot.target shutdown.target
   

2. Load it:
   root #systemctl daemon-reload
3. Enable it:
   root #systemctl enable kill-chrome-gracefully.service

See also

• Chromium — the open source version of Google's Chrome web browser.
• Firefox — open source, multiplatform, web browser developed by Mozilla.