Install Google Chrome 85 on Debian, Ubuntu and Linux Mint

Google Chrome Browser developed by Google Inc. is a freeware web browser licensed under Google Chrome Terms of Service.

As per Wikipedia (as of May 2020) statistics and trends Google Chrome Browser has a 68% usages of globally and we can say it’s not an ideal alternative browser but it’s the best and widely used internet browser, which uses the WebKit layout engine.

Google chrome is a popular browser because of its simplicity, load quickly i.e. speed, customizable, stable, and security. The Google Chrome stable build 85.0.4183 was released on 21 September 2020, for Windows, Mac, and Linux with a number of fixes and improvements.

In this post, we’ll show you some easy steps to install Google Chrome Browser in Debian 10/9/8, Ubuntu 20.04-18.04, and Linux Mint 20-18. However, the same installation instructions also work on older versions of Debian, Ubuntu, and Mint distributions.

There are two official ways to install the Chrome browser, the one is using Google Chrome PPA and the other method is, directly downloading and installing ‘.deb‘ packages. We will show you both ways so that you can select whatever method you feel easy.

Installing Google Chrome Browser Using PPA

1. We use Google’s official Linux software repository (PPA) that will automatically install and configure settings needed to keep your chrome browser up-to-date.

Before installing the repository, we need to download and install Google’s Linux package signing Key that will automatically configure your package manager to verify the integrity of packages before downloading and installing on the system.

On Debian based systems (Ubuntu, Linux Mint, etc.), use the following wget command to download the key and then use ‘apt-key‘ to add it to the system.

$ wget -q -O - https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub | sudo apt-key add -

2. After adding the key, run the following command to add a chrome repository to your system sources.

$ sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google.list'

3. After adding the chrome repository, you must do a system update to update the newly added chrome repository, using the following command.

$ sudo apt-get update

4. Now, here Google PPA provides three chrome versions (stable, beta, and unstable), so install whatever version you prefer.

Install Chrome Stable Version

$ sudo apt-get install google-chrome-stable

Install Chrome Beta Version

$ sudo apt-get install google-chrome-beta

Install Chrome Unstable Version

$ sudo apt-get install google-chrome-unstable

Installing Google Chrome Browser Using Deb Package

1. Go to the Google Chrome download page and select your package or you can use following the wget command to download and install the latest version.

Note: Google Chrome ends support for all 32-bit Linux distributions from March 2016.

$ wget https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb
$ sudo dpkg -i google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb

2. Once it’s installed, launch Google Chrome Browser with a normal user.

$ google-chrome-stable

Google Chrome Preview Removing Google Chrome Browser

To completely uninstall, use the following command.

$ sudo apt-get remove google-chrome-stable