How To Install Google Chrome On Ubuntu

Chrome isn’t included in Ubuntu’s official repositories as it’s a proprietary browser. As such, you’ll have to install it from third-party sources.

We’ll source the Chrome package from Google’s site and install it. Aside from this, we’ll also cover basic management steps like updating or removing Chrome in this article.

Install Chrome Graphically

New users might prefer installing Chrome from the GUI as the process is intuitive and similar to other platforms. 

1. To start, go to the Google Chrome page and click on Download Chrome.
   
2. Select the .deb package and press Accept and install.
   
3. In the Downloads folder, right-click the package and select Open With Another Application.
   
4. Click on Software Install and press the Select button.
   
5. Press Install and enter your password for authentication.
   
6. After the installation completes, you can launch Chrome from the Applications screen.
   

Install Chrome from the Terminal

You can also perform the same process faster from the terminal. To do this, obtain the latest stable package first.

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

Install the package with

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

If you encounter any dependency errors, try running the command shown below or installing the missing packages manually. 

sudo apt-get -f install

After installing Chrome, you can launch it from the terminal by entering

google-chrome

Managing Google Chrome

When installing Chrome, the official Google repo is added to your system’s sources list. Thanks to this, Chrome will automatically be updated when you’re updating the other packages in your system with

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

If you only want to update Chrome, you can instead use

sudo apt update && sudo apt install --only-upgrade google-chrome-stable

Finally, if you need to uninstall Chrome, you can do so with

sudo apt purge google-chrome-stable

This is assuming you installed the Stable version as we did in this tutorial. If you installed the Beta or Unstable versions and want to remove those, use these commands instead.

sudo apt purge google-chrome-beta

sudo apt purge google-chrome-unstable