How do I completely uninstall Google Chrome and Chromium?
Solution 1
For Google Chrome:
Deleting ~/.config/google-chrome
(where ~
is your home directory) should be sufficient. Why don't you try it and see? (Of course, this will delete all your bookmarks too.)
If that's not sufficient, you may want to also remove Google Chrome from the Terminal using the sudo apt-get purge ...
command (where ...
is replaced by the package you want to remove or a space-separated list of the packages you want to remove), or remove it in the Synaptic Package Manager (which you can install in the Software Center if you don't have it; it's itself provided by the package synaptic
) by right-clicking on the packages you want to remove and clicking "Mark for Complete Removal". These ways of removing packages will remove all global (i.e., non-user-specific) configuration files.
For Chromium (the completely open source counterpart to Chrome):
You can do it the same way, just delete ~/.config/chromium
. You can also remove the package as mentioned above for Google Chrome. The package that provides Chromium in Ubuntu is called chromium-browser
.
Solution 2
Note: this recipe has been updated in 2020 to more safely backup the files rather than using a recursive delete.
To uninstall Chromium Browser, run these commands from your terminal:
$ sudo apt-get purge chromium-browser
$ mv ~/.config/chromium/ ~/.config/chromium.bak/
To uninstall Google Chrome, run these commands from your terminal:
$ sudo apt-get purge google-chrome-stable
$ mv ~/.config/google-chrome/ ~/.config/google-chrome.bak/
In both examples, the first command removes the package while the second command will move custom settings, such as plugins, to a backup directory.
Solution 3
I successfully removed Google Chrome by running the following command:
sudo apt-get purge google-chrome-stable
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Comments
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JohnB almost 2 years
I'm having a problem with Chrome and one of its extensions, so I want to completely uninstall everything. I've uninstalled Chrome through the Software Center, but when I reinstall it, all of my extensions and preferences are still there.
If I want to start over from scratch, what do I need to do?
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JohnB over 12 yearsBookmarks are saved in XMarks, so not an issue. I'll try deleting the folder and see if that helps. If not, I'll try the other suggestions. Thanks.
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seddka almost 11 yearshow do I remove Chrome from the terminal using apt-get purge .... ?
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Amitabha Biswas about 8 yearsSuccessfully uninstall 'Google Chrome' stable.
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Tristan Wiley about 7 yearsYou can find where the Chrome file is using
which google-chrome
and deleting it there. It should be in/usr/bin/
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Apteryx almost 7 yearsYou'll also want to remove /etc/apt/sources.d/google.list and its public keys that got added to /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.
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Elliott almost 6 yearsthis answer is incomplete because it doesnt note that chrome is called google-chrome-stable under apt-get.
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Peter over 5 yearsDon't forget there are also files in
~/.cache/google-chrome/
and~/.config/google-chrome/
. And there are variants of Google chrome likegoogle-chrome-beta
andgoogle-chrome-stable
. If in doubt you can check you've got everything by runninglocate google-chrome
. locate is a local search tool that can be installed withsudo apt install locate
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Abhishek Yadav over 5 yearsNo need to write '-get' in Ubuntu version 18.04 or greater
-
Nitish Parkar almost 4 yearsFor me,
locate google-chrome
returned a lot of files that had already been deleted. If anyone faces the same problem, runsudo updatedb
to update mlocate database. (locate
searches for entries in mlocate database)