Chromium

Approving Ungoogled Chromium on a Mac

If you use ungoogled-chromium on a Mac, you’ll know that every time the app is upgraded, you get a popup saying macOS cannot verify the developer of, etc, etc. It’s because the people compiling the app aren’t paying the Apple developer fee to get it officialy signed.

No matter.

Add the following to your .zshrc file:

alias approvechromium='sudo spctl --add /Applications/Chromium.app'

Restart you terminal and type approvechromium and then try to start the app again.

Blank Profile Every Startup

I tend to use ungoogled-chromium when a site isn’t working in Safari or Firefox. When I use Chromium, I want a completely new blank profile, no extensions, no bookmarks, nothing.

The easiest way to do this is create a script that creates a new profile in the /tmp directory. and create a Mac “Application” to call the script.

First, the shell script:

#!/bin/zsh
 
# Create a random directory in /tmp
TMP_DIR=$(mktemp -d /tmp/chromeprofile.XXXXXX)
 
# Run Chromium with the random user data directory
/Applications/Chromium.app/Contents/MacOS/Chromium --user-data-dir="$TMP_DIR"
 
# Clean up the temporary directory after Chromium closes
rm -rf "$TMP_DIR"

Save it somewhere make it executable:

chmod +x <script filename>

Now, let’s write a line of AppleScript in the Script Editor:

do shell script "/path/to/script"

Export it as an Application file format and save it in /Applications.

Open up Application folder in Finder and doubleclick on the AppleScript file.