Chromium

From postmarketOS

This page explains how to make chromium usable in mobile UIs like Plasma Mobile.

Alt text
Chromium running on Plasma Mobile

Installation

Install chromium package from alpine. The armv7 package is not available anymore (another solution for this architecture is to compile Chromium or use an alternate web browser: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Web_browsers).

Configure startup (scale + useragent)

Edit /usr/share/applications/chromium.desktop and set the following line:

Exec= chromium-browser %U --start-maximized  --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.4.2; Nexus 5 Build/KOT49H) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/32.0.1700.99 Mobile Safari/537.36"

You may adapt scale and useragent to your needs.

Wayland

Note Expect issues since Ozone (which enables Wayland support) is still in development!

There have been problems reported using Chromium under XWayland, getting cannot open display: :0 errors.

As described in the ArchWiki, since version 87 you should be able to use Chromium's native wayland support through the following flags:

$ chromium-browser --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=wayland

You might want to make these arguments persistent through adding them to the desktop file, located under /usr/share/applications/chromium.desktop.

Related issue: pmaports#998

On-screen keyboard

Currently, the on-screen keyboard does not work with Plasma Mobile (see [1]). You may install this extension to get a virtual keyboard nevertheless (though it does not work with every website):

Scroll-bar

Access "chrome://flags". To do that type it in the Plasma Mobile search bar (on home screen), and then copy and paste it in the chromium url bar.

Enable the following flags:

  • Smooth Scrolling
  • Overlay Scrollbars
  • Scroll prediction

This will allow to have a good scrolling experience, and hide scrollbar, so that it does not take screen-space.