Chromium And Ungoogled Chromium Web Browsers Are Now Available On Flathub

Chromium web browser is now available on Flathub, making it easy to install and update across many Linux distributions. Following the standard Chromium browser, Ungoogled Chromium has also been added to Flathub.

The pull request that adds Chromium to Flahub mentions that the flatpak package comes with:

• native Flatpak support
• support for VA-API, OpenH264 and libfdk-aac
• has support for Widevine
• experimental XDG portal support (so no filesystem access is needed in that case), but which has been disabled for now by default due to this issue
• has open support for native messaging hosts as another extension point

I'd like to note that while Chromium browser installed from Flathub has VA-API support, it doesn't work with Nvidia graphics using the VDPAU-based backend for VA-API (libva-vdpau-driver). For AMD / Intel graphics, enable Hardware-accelerated video decode from chrome://flags, and install the h264ify extension if your graphics can't natively decode VP8/VP9.

To install Chromium web browser from Flathub, make sure you have Flatpak setup for your Linux distribution, then add the Flathub repository and install it:

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
flatpak install flathub org.chromium.Chromium

Following Chromium browser, Ungoogled Chromium has also been added to Flathub. This is Chromium without any dependencies on Google web services while retaining the default Chromium experience as closely as possible. 

The web browser also has some tweaks to enhance privacy, control and transparency, however, most of these are not enabled by default. See this page for an Ungoogled Chromium feature overview.

The Ungoogled Chromium flatpak package from Flathub has the same patches as Chromium from the most part, minus everything Google (so no Widevine, etc.).

You can install Ungoogled Chromium from Flathub using:

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
flatpak install flathub com.github.Eloston.UngoogledChromium

Google Chrome and Brave, two other Chromium-based web browsers, are available on Flahub beta right now, and are expected to be promoted to Flathub stable in the future.

You can install them from Flathub Beta using:

• Brave:

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub-beta https://flathub.org/beta-repo/flathub-beta.flatpakrepo
flatpak install flathub-beta com.brave.Browser

• Google Chrome:

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub-beta https://flathub.org/beta-repo/flathub-beta.flatpakrepo
flatpak install com.google.Chrome