If that’s you, don’t fret. While malware and other issues can make it so Chromium won’t uninstall in Windows 10, it’s not impossible to remove. With a few tips, tricks, and tools, you can remove Chromium for good.
Do You Need to Uninstall Chromium?
If Chromium is behaving normally or not causing you any problems, you don’t need to uninstall it. It can exist alongside other Chromium browsers, like Chrome, perfectly fine and if you don’t use it, it won’t do much. That said, some builds of Chromium won’t auto-update like more commercial browsers will, so Chromium can be a potential malware-infection point. It’s also possible to download bugged versions which have been deliberately hijacked. And as with every application, corruption or some form of outage during an install or uninstall can make it difficult to delete Chromium as you normally would. In those cases, getting rid of Chromium might be a good idea.
How to Uninstall Chromium
Before you dig into the more hands-on methods of uninstalling or removing Chromium from your Windows 10 PC, it’s important to try the more typical route of uninstalling it as that will usually work without a hitch. The process involves Windows 10’s settings menu, which if you’re familiar with it, you won’t need much instruction. But if you’d like a little help with the process, we have a section in our Chromium guide for how to uninstall Chromium.
How to Remove Chromium Files Manually
The next step in your quest to rid your system of Chromium entirely, is to get hands-on and remove all mentions of it manually. Depending on whether your Chromium install is just corrupted, or actively attempted to thwart being uninstalled due to malware, your success at this may vary, but if you follow these steps you should be able to delete all mentions of Chromium from your Windows 10 PC, at which point it shouldn’t be able to operate or harm your system in any way.
Use Anti-Malware Scans to Get Rid of Chromium
Once you’ve manually removed all of the elements of Chromium you can find—or even if you haven’t and you’re still worried about it—then running an anti-malware scan is a great idea. If your Chromium installation has been corrupted by malware, a scan from a piece of antivirus software will usually clean it out, or at worst, quarantine it so it can no longer do any harm. If you have antivirus installed already, running a scan with that might do the trick. It should be your first port of call. That said, if Chromium is infected, it’s possible that the malware has already slipped past your antivirus software so you may want to use an alternative. There are a number of great anti-malware tools out there, many of them free, but our favorite scanning tool, otherwise known as a remediation anti-malware solution, is Malwarebytes. Its scanning tool is entirely free. Once you’ve completed the anti-malware scan, you may want to attempt to manually remove any mention of Chromium if you haven’t already. Anything left over won’t be harmful, but if you want to rid yourself of any mention of Chromium, that’s still the best way. For tips on how to do so, refer to the section above.
