Are you having trouble uninstalling Chromium? Well, you are not alone and believe me people have tried getting rid of this potentially malicious adware using conventional means, they just have not been pretty successful.
But do not lose your confidence because this article provides you with a number of uncustomary techniques to flush out Chromium from your system permanently.
1. Use Control Panel To Uninstall Chromium
If you are using a Settings app to uninstall Chromium and fail to do so, you can try the traditional Windows Control Panel instead.
Search for the Control Panel in the Start menu and open the same from the search result. Now, click on the Uninstall a program link under Program. Make sure you have set View by option to Category.
Uninstall A Program
On the next window, search for Chromium and right-click on it when you find it. Now, click on Uninstall and follow the instructions on the screen to remove it altogether.
Restart the PC after you uninstall Chromium completely. If the Chromium won’t uninstall because of a temporary glitch, you will possibly be able to do it via the Control Panel.
2. How to stop Chromium processes using Task manager
This process merely stops all Chromium operations running in the background, which should buy you enough time to work on other techniques to uninstall Chromium permanently.
To get this done all you have to do is close all your browsers and open the Task Manager.
You will see a Chromium process running. It has a logo similar to the Chrome browser logo but with a slight blueish color.
Kill all the chrome.exe or chromuim.exe processes that you see.
3. 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 an 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.
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 leftover 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.
4. Uninstall Chromium by Deleting AppData
In some cases, the issue is that users uninstall Chromium from their Windows 10 PC, but the program reinstalls itself in the next reboot. This happens because some of the underlying program files of that software are still there in the AppData folder, which is the cause of concern. So after uninstalling the app from the Control Panel, it is highly recommended to delete all the files of the AppData folder as well. Here is how this could be done:
Click on the Start menu and search for Control Panel.
Go to Uninstall a Program and browse to Chromium.
Right-click on it and select Uninstall. Once that is done, restart your PC once.
There is a high chance if some of the files being left over, as mentioned before. So to delete them, head over to C Drive.
Then go to Users > “username” > AppData > Local. In some cases, this folder might be hidden. To unhide it, go to the View tab in the top menu bar and tick-mark the hidden items. You should now see the AppData folder.
Under Local, there should be a folder named Chromium. Select it and hit Shift+Delete. This will permanently delete the folder from your PC. If that doesn’t work, hit the Delete key and then remove that folder from Recycle Bin.
That is it. You have successfully uninstalled Chromium from your Windows 10 PC. If that tricks works out for you, well and good, otherwise refer to the next tip given below.
5. Reset your browser settings to default
It’s possible that your default webpage was changed, or you simply noticed some things out of the ordinary with your web browser after installing Chromium. In this case, we recommend resetting your browser to its defaults. Keep in mind that this will get rid of any modified settings, whether it was by you or an app.
Follow the steps below to reset your browser settings to their defaults. We’ll be using Google Chrome to demonstrate, however, the process should be similar on all browsers.
Open your web browser. Again, we’re using Google Chrome.
Click on the three dots in the upper right corner of the browser. This is Google Chrome’s “More” menu.
Select “Settings.”
Scroll to the bottom of the page, then click on “Advanced.”
Again, scroll to the bottom until you see “Reset and clean up.”
Click on “Restore settings to their original defaults.”
Click on the “Reset settings” button and wait for Google Chrome to relaunch.