Chrome/Chromium Experimenting With Flatpak Packaging

Google engineers responsible for the Chrome/Chromium web browser are experimenting with Flatpak packaging on Linux. They aren't yet committed to officially supporting Flatpak packages but for now are at least exploring the option.

Tom Anderson of Google's browser team today landed the experimental Flatpak packaging support for testing. In the merge it explains the current testing intent without yet having any definitive plans to officially support it:

"Add experimental Flatpak packaging in chrome/installer/linux to facilitate testing restricted sandboxing configurations and extending existing XDG portal support. This is not a commitment to officially support Flatpak packages.

- Create chrome/installer/linux/flatpak/ with packaging scripts and templates for metadata, AppStream metainfo, and launcher entrypoint.
- Add enable_flatpak GN build argument (default false).
- Add package_format to InstallerConfig and omit host desktop integration artifacts (system desktop files, /usr/bin symlinks, AppStream appdata, GNOME default apps, manpages, and AppArmor profiles) when packaging for Flatpak.
- Update common/installer.py with Flatpak configuration and App ID mapping for Chromium (org.chromium.Chromium*) and Google Chrome
(com.google.Chrome*).
- Generalize common/desktop.template to support both Flatpak and system-wide desktop execution commands.
- Disable setuid sandbox and zlib compression for non-official builds.
- Update BUILD.gn with flatpak packaging targets and aliases."

An exciting development for this Linux app sandboxing and distribution tech. This would also help improve Google Chrome/Chromium support outside the likes of RPM and Debian based distributions with a cleaner packaging experience.

The testing code is merged and hopefully it ultimately proves well enough for Google to officially support Flatpak for Chrome.