User-installed (standalone) Google Chrome for Linux

Last Modified: Fri, 15 Oct 2010 16:55:19 +0000 ; Created: Fri, 15 Oct 2010 16:55:19 +0000

So I wanted to use Chrome on a computer that didn't have it installed that was running Ubuntu Linux. I didn't have admin, but I wanted to run the program inside the user-space without installing it for all users anyway (a stand-alone install). The default downloads provided by Google are only .deb or .rpm packages which only run in the admin installer. Extracting it by hand was not an option. Another choice was to download the source and compile it. However 800MB+ of source and compile code was too big for my user quota.

Solution

I downloaded the latest developer build of Chrome for Linux. It is just an archive with the compiled binaries that you can extract and run.

Get it from http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-linux/.

Also by default the Google Chrome (ver 8 for Linux) uses the system installed Adobe Flash. To force it to use the latest:

  1. Download the .tar.gz from Adobe (Flash for Linux)
  2. Extract the single libflashplayer.so plugin file into chrome-linux/plugins (you will probably have to create the plugins directory).
  3. Close and reopen Chrome.
  4. Type about:plugins and disabled the Shockwave Flash older version and make sure your version is selected
    • You will need to click on Details near top right