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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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    I'm going to make this into a more general question, since the directions here will cover both Chromium and Google Chrome.
    – jrg
    Feb 15, 2012 at 21:10

3 Answers 3

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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.

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    Successfully uninstall 'Google Chrome' stable.
    – Amitabha Biswas
    May 23, 2016 at 8:19
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    Don't forget there are also files in ~/.cache/google-chrome/ and ~/.config/google-chrome/. And there are variants of Google chrome like google-chrome-beta and google-chrome-stable. If in doubt you can check you've got everything by running locate google-chrome. locate is a local search tool that can be installed with sudo apt install locate
    – Peter
    Feb 8, 2019 at 10:05
  • For me, locate google-chrome returned a lot of files that had already been deleted. If anyone faces the same problem, run sudo updatedb to update mlocate database. (locate searches for entries in mlocate database)
    – Nitish Parkar
    Jul 31, 2020 at 8:07
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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.

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  • Bookmarks 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.
    – EmmyS
    Nov 23, 2011 at 23:30
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    how do I remove Chrome from the terminal using apt-get purge .... ?
    – Alan Coromano
    Sep 8, 2013 at 0:18
  • You can find where the Chrome file is using which google-chrome and deleting it there. It should be in /usr/bin/
    – Tristan Wiley
    Apr 13, 2017 at 21:28
  • this answer is incomplete because it doesnt note that chrome is called google-chrome-stable under apt-get.
    – Elliott
    Aug 23, 2018 at 16:49
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I successfully removed Google Chrome by running the following command:

sudo apt-get purge google-chrome-stable
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    You'll also want to remove /etc/apt/sources.d/google.list and its public keys that got added to /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.
    – Apteryx
    Jul 31, 2017 at 14:49
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    No need to write '-get' in Ubuntu version 18.04 or greater
    – Abhishek Yadav
    Mar 16, 2019 at 18:11

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