How to install Google Chrome Browser on Kali Linux

Objective

The objective is to install Google Chrome web browser on Kali Linux. See an appendix for a possible issue troubleshooting.

Requirements

Privileged access to your Kali Linux installation or Live system is required.

Difficulty

EASY

Conventions

• # - requires given linux commands to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command
• $ - requires given linux commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged user

Instructions

Download Google Chrome

To start, use wget command to download a latest Google Chrome debian package:

# wget https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb

Install Google Chrome

The easiest way to install google chrome on you Kali Linux is to by use of gdebi which will automatically download all depended packages. First, install gdebi:

# apt install gdebi-core

Once ready, install the actual google chrome package:

# gdebi google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb

Start Google Chrome

To start Google Chrome, open up a terminal and run google-chrome command:

$ google-chrome --no-sandbox

Appendix

No sandbox

ERROR:zygote_host_impl_linux.cc(89)] Running as root without --no-sandbox is not supported.

To avoid this error simply start the Google Chrome browser by using a --no-sandbox switch:

# google-chrome --no-sandbox

Illegal Instruction

The Illegal Instruction error message appears when running the google-chrome command as privileged root user. Since by default Kali Linux's default user is root, we need to create a dummy non-privileged user eg. linuxconfig, and use this user to start Google Chrome browser:

# useradd -m -d /home/linuxconfig linuxconfig
# su linuxconfig -c google-chrome

Package libappindicator1 is not installed

dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of google-chrome-stable:
 google-chrome-stable depends on libappindicator1; however:
  Package libappindicator1 is not installed.

To resolve Google Chrome's dependencies problems use gdebi to install Google Chrome's debian package. See above.