I recently started using Ungoogled Chromium on Invisible Arch Linux after looking for alternatives to Firefox. After a couple weeks of use I can say Ungoogled Chromium is a great browser and it’s become my goto alternative to GNU IceCat on Linux when not using Tor Browser. The only downside I found is that you need to jump through a few hoops to install Chrome Extensions.
But it’s not that much work to get extensions running in Ungoogled Chromium. And you don’t even need a Google account. Let me show you how.
To install an extension first get the link to the extension you wish to install and drop it into Ungoogled Extension.
Ungoogled extension will validate the extension link and let you download the extension without a Google account. For example, to get the React DevTools paste the following link into Ungoogled Extension’s input control then press Install:
You’ll likely see the following message in a browser alert:
Apps, extensions, and user scripts cannot be added from this website
Click OK to dismiss the message or just ignore it.
The extension will be downloaded as a .crx file and saved to your download folder. Once it’s downloaded open a terminal and use unzip to extract the contents of the CRX file into a directory named unpacked:
unzip extension_4_7_0_0.crx -d unpacked
Once the extension is unpacked open Ungoogled Chromium and navigate to chrome://extensions, enable Developer mode using the toggle in the top-right then press the Load unpacked button as shown here:
From there locate the folder with the unpacked extension and open it. Doing so will load the extension into the browser and you can begin using it just as if you’d installed from the Web Store.
You’re done! Be sure to bookmark ungoogled-extension.github.io so you can get back to it later. And rm -rf unpacked to clean-up after yourself.