This tutorial will help you install Ungoogled Chromium web browser on Ubuntu 24.04 “Noble Numbat”. Ungoogled Chromium is the free software version of Chrome and its developers offers better privacy by cleaning it out from integrating with Google. This continues our last month’s article Librewolf – A Firefox Alternative. Happy installing!
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For Ubuntu Lunar and Jammy
At the time we write this article, only Lunar (23.04) and Jammy (22.04 LTS) OS versions supported officially by the project. That means, if you install it this way, you will be able to upgrade easily if there is new version available right from the developer. If you are using OS version other than these, or if you prefer AppImage (download+click+run) format, please skip to next section.
1. Visit their official website https://ungoogled-software.github.io.
2. On the web page, click Download.
3. If the download page offers you a link to new download page (“Downloads moved here”), click it, now you are on the GitHub of Ungoogled Chromium.
4. On the GitHub page, find the words “Debian & Ubuntu” and click the link, now you are at another GitHub page.
5. On this GitHub page, find the words “Getting OBS packages” and click the link, now you are at Open Build Service (OBS) the internet software builder generously provided by openSUSE (it is like Launchpad PPA to Ubuntu users).
6. On this OBS page, find Ubuntu, click it, and below it click “Add Repository”, you will see an instruction to add OBS as a new repository (similar to a PPA) to your Ubuntu system.
7. Run Terminal and copy-paste each of these four (4) command lines followed by Enter:
$ echo ‘deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/ungoogled_chromium/Ubuntu_Jammy/ /’ | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/home:ungoogled_chromium.list
$ curl -fsSL https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:ungoogled_chromium/Ubuntu_Lunar/Release.key | gpg –dearmor | sudo tee /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/home_ungoogled_chromium.gpg > /dev/null
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install ungoogled-chromium
Sample picture:
8. Ungoogled Chromium installed successfully. Now you can run it from applications menu.
For Ubuntu 24.04 and Older/Newer Versions
This method makes use of AppImage version of Ungoogled Chromium from third-party that is recommended in the official website.
1. Repeat steps 1-3 from the above.
2. On the Github page, look for “Third-party Binaries”, click the link, now you are on another page offering a list of Ungoogled Chromium downloads for various operating systems.
3. On the page, look for “GNU/Linux AppImage 64-bit”, click the link, you downloaded an application in a package file format that looks like this “ungoogled-chromium_x.y.z.a.AppImage”. At the moment, we observe the version is 128 and the size is about 170 megabytes.
(Files showing how an AppImage package file would look like. In this example, Ungoogled Chromium logo is visible just like exe on Windows or apk on Android.)
4. Run that AppImage file.
Read our tutorial How To Run AppImages on Ubuntu 24.04 if you didn’t know how. Please read See Also section below.
5. Ungoogled Chromium successfully running. Happy browsing!
6. To run the program again, simply run the AppImage file.
7. No need to uninstall the program because it is not installed.
Notes
We pick Ungoogled Chromium because of numerous reasons:
1) It is an active Free Software project.
2) It is a modified version of Chromium Browser (the original version of Google Chrome) that promises the code is cleaned from nonfree bits and deletes all Google integration.
3) GNU Guix project maintains latest version of Ungoogled Chromium. This can be viewed as a guarantee that Ungoogled Chromium is without doubts free software.
4) It is available as traditional DEB packages instead of Snap.
(Ungoogled Chromium viewing a Wikipedia article entitled Free Software)
What is Free Software?
you are asking, “what is free software?” and “isn’t Chrome also a free
software?” The answer is according to our community: free software is
every computer program that the user and the community are free (unlimited) to use,
study, modify, and share in both forms source code and binary code, in
both ways gratis and paid. To learn more, read the Free Software Definition (read See Also section below). If you look at Chrome’s license, it clearly fails the definition.
software no matter if you can get it gratis. Because it is nonfree
(proprietary), you are powerless to its developer’s decisions and cannot
make sure what Chrome is actually doing on your computer, and cannot
change it as well if it does anything you do not like. Please learn more at The GNU Project the excellent article Google’s Software is Malware (read See Also). We explain this because we know many people use Chrome believing it is free software and not malware and we hope we can give them a better replacement.
See Also
How To Run AppImages on Ubuntu 24.04
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This article is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.