Firefox's website provides binary tarballs that I can easily extract and run, is there anything similar available for either Chrome or Chromium?
If not, how can I compile so I can run it the same way as the extracted files of binary tarball?
All the Chromium builds for different systems are stored here as zip archives.
Binaries for Linux: 32 bit | 64 bit
(It takes a while to load the list)
The latest 64-bit version is located here:
http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-snapshots/Linux_x64/LATEST/chrome-linux.zip
Where LATEST
is contents of the file located here:
http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-snapshots/Linux_x64/LAST_CHANGE
If you need the 32-bit version, remove _x64
from those links
This allows us to make a script to automatically download the latest build:
#!/bin/bash
CHROMIUM_ROOT="http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-snapshots/Linux_x64"
CHROMIUM_LATEST=`wget -q -O - "$CHROMIUM_ROOT/LAST_CHANGE"`
wget $CHROMIUM_ROOT/$CHROMIUM_LATEST/chrome-linux.zip
In short there are no official tarballs of Chrome but if you don't mind breaking your profile you can try the continuous build tarballs mentioned in this Chromium-discuss group (and definitely avoid the nightly builds).
If you are on Ubuntu you are far better off using prepackaged version of Chrome. Google provide Chrome repositories for the major Linux distributions. If you're desperate, you could always download the deb/rpm and extract the contents and get the whole caboodle going with the wrapper script from a continuous build...