Google Chrome, commonly referred to as Chrome, is the web browser by Google. It has been the most widely used web browser on desktops for a long time now. It is based on the free and open-source browser Chromium, also by Google. Chromium is supposed to be a lightweight browser with minimal features, hence the need for Chrome, which contains all the latest features and technologies.

Chrome is available for all popular operating systems. The latest release of Chrome is version 81, at the time of writing this article. In Ubuntu, although most users prefer Firefox, as it now contains most features of proprietary browsers like Chrome, there can be some websites which run on proprietary technologies supported only by Chrome, eg. some latest video codecs. In such a case Chrome is required to be installed on Ubuntu. In this article, we will see how to install Chrome on Ubuntu 20.04, the latest release of Ubuntu.

Installation

Google Chrome is not available in the Ubuntu repositories. We need to manually download deb package for Chrome.

To download the latest stable Chrome release from the command line, we’ll use the wget command and Chrome’s direct download link from Google’s servers.

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

Once the download is finished, run the following command to install Google Chrome from the .deb file.

sudo dpkg -i google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb

Note that this will not only install Chrome, but also add the Google repositories to the list of apt repositories (By default the list has only official Ubuntu repositories), so that you can upgrade your Google Chrome version using apt instead of downloading a newer deb file again.

Let’s now verify the installation.

Verifying the Installation

Run the following on the command line to verify if Google Chrome has been installed.

google-chrome --version

The output above confirms that Google Chrome has been installed successfully.

You can start Chrome from the command line with the command google-chrome or by searching it in Activities on the top left corner of your screen.

We saw how to install Google Chrome on Ubuntu 20.04 desktop. As mentioned before, this installation also updates the apt source repositories with Google repository. The Google repository contains three packages for Google Chrome; google-chrome-stable, google-chrome-beta and google-chrome-unstable. Out of these three, google-chrome-stable is the package which contains the latest stable release of Chrome.

Thus, you just need to run apt update and apt install google-chrome-stable when you want to upgrade Google Chrome to the latest version. There is no need to download the deb file again. Also, if you remove Google Chrome with apt remove, the apt sources are not affected by this, and if you want to reinstall Chrome, you can do so simply by running apt install google-chrome-stable.