Chromium

Installation

NixOS

Add chromium to systemPackages.

Updating browser policies

In Chromium, policy settings are accessible via chrome://policy. They allow the user to change enterprise policies affecting things like

• Creating webapps when the browser is installed
• Finding and downloading browser extensions automatically
• Enabling or disabling the dinosaur game when the device is offline
• Disable screenshots to be taken with browser extensions
• Block all downloads from the browser (if you want to do that for some reason)
• and more!

A full list of policies can be found at Chrome Enterprise Policy List & Management.

Natively Supported Policies

By default NixOS provides a few policies that can be enabled directly, a simple example is given below to understand how these are implemented

  programs.chromium = {
    enable = true;
    homepageLocation = "https://www.startpage.com/";
    extensions = [
      "eimadpbcbfnmbkopoojfekhnkhdbieeh;https://clients2.google.com/service/update2/crx" # dark reader
      "aapbdbdomjkkjkaonfhkkikfgjllcleb;https://clients2.google.com/service/update2/crx" # google translate
    ];
    extraOpts = {
      "WebAppInstallForceList" = [
        {
          "custom_name" = "Youtube";
          "create_desktop_shortcut" = false;
          "default_launch_container" = "window";
          "url" = "https://youtube.com";
        }
      ];
    };
  };

• homepageLocation option allows you to set the site that the homepage will open on
• extensions allows for the download of extensions directly in the browser through a simple list of the extension ID's that can be obtained from the Chrome Web Store by opening an extension page and copying the last part of the URL
  • In the example however there is another component, the download source from which the extensions will be downloaded
  • The URL provided in the list is the link that is used by google for managing, checking and updating extensions
  • So the method of just placing the extension ID can work like this: "fnpbehpgglbfnpimkachnpnecjncndgm"
  • But just in case that method does not automatically function the second method is shown above, where you place ; and then the URL https //clients2.google.com/service/update2/crx to explicitly tell NixOS where to install the extension from
• There are many more options that are natively supported and you can learn about them through man configuration.nix
• But as shown above there is also an extraOpts option and that is used for policies that are not supported for direct setup, such as the policy to install web-apps

Non-natively Supported Policies

There are hundreds of policies in Chromium based browsers, and not all have direct methods to set them. The extraOpts option allows for the declaration of all the other policies.

There is no single place to find all Chromium policies, but these are some places to look;

• Commonly used policies are present and documented within man configuration.nix under programs.chromium.
• You can navigate to chrome://policy and enable "Show policies with no value set" to see all available keys. Clicking a policy name opens its specific definition and usage details.
• The most up to date policies for Chromium are available in the source code.

Accelerated video playback

Make sure Accelerated Video Playback is setup on the system properly. Check chrome://gpu to see if Chromium has enabled hardware acceleration.

If accelerated video playback is not working, check relevant flags at chrome://flags, or enable them using the CLI:

❄︎ /etc/nixos/configuration.nix

{
  environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
    (chromium.override {
      commandLineArgs = [
        "--enable-features=AcceleratedVideoEncoder"
        "--ignore-gpu-blocklist"
        "--enable-zero-copy"
      ];
    })
  ];
}

In some cases, chrome://gpu will show Video Decode as enabled, but Video Acceleration Information as blank, with chrome://media-internals using the FFmpeg Video Decoder (software decoding). If this happens, try to enable the following features:

❄︎ /etc/nixos/configuration.nix

{
  environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
    (chromium.override {
      commandLineArgs = [
        "--enable-features=AcceleratedVideoEncoder,VaapiOnNvidiaGPUs,VaapiIgnoreDriverChecks,Vulkan,DefaultANGLEVulkan,VulkanFromANGLE"
        "--enable-features=VaapiIgnoreDriverChecks,VaapiVideoDecoder,PlatformHEVCDecoderSupport"
        "--enable-features=UseMultiPlaneFormatForHardwareVideo"
        "--ignore-gpu-blocklist"
        "--enable-zero-copy"
      ];
    })
  ];
}

Enabling native Wayland support

You can enable native Wayland support in all Chromium based and most Electron apps by setting the `NIXOS_OZONE_WL` environment variable to `1`.

Enabling DRM (Widevine support)

By default, chromium does not support playing DRM protected media. However, there is a build time flag to include the proprietary Widevine blob from Nixpkgs:

❄︎ /etc/nixos/configuration.nix

{
  environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
    (chromium.override { enableWideVine = true; })
  ];
}

KeePassXC support in Flatpak

To enable browser integration between KeePassXC and Chromium-based browsers when running in Flatpak, configure the following filesystem access:

# NativeMessagingHost directory (browser-specific)
# Brave Browser
xdg-config/BraveSoftware/Brave-Browser/NativeMessagingHosts:ro
# Chromium
xdg-config/chromium/NativeMessagingHosts:ro
# Google Chrome
xdg-config/google-chrome/NativeMessagingHosts:ro

# KeePassXC server socket and Nix store
xdg-run/app/org.keepassxc.KeePassXC/org.keepassxc.KeePassXC.BrowserServer
/nix/store:ro

Using libc memory allocator

Chromium may not work when an alternative system-wide memory allocator like scudo is used. To use libc on Chromium, the following firejail wrap is required:

programs.firejail = {
  enable = true;
  wrappedBinaries = {
    chromium = {
      executable = "${pkgs.chromium}/bin/chromium-browser";
      profile = "${pkgs.firejail}/etc/firejail/chromium-browser.profile";
      extraArgs = [
        "--blacklist=/etc/ld-nix.so.preload"
      ];
    };
  };
};