My problem has continued for years on my laptop. I have installed Lubuntu (for years), Pop_OS (last year), and now for about a month generic Ubuntu 24.04, carrying always home-partition. Because I have a long history of sites in Chromium (cookies, passwords, etc), I have not tried to start Chromium from a clean slate, even cleaning all cookies seems to lead to too many complications, so I have avoided it at all cost.
It began one day when I had to log in to Chromium to my Google account and it failed when I used autofilled email and password. It was weird so I tried again and again until I let it show the saved password and it revealed like this (sorry for the Estonian screenshot, I hope it is still pretty much intelligible, the beginning of the email and password are scrambled for security):
The password is shown as some random bytes. My actual password is long (but shown password is still about twice as long) and contains alphanumeric characters, so it has no resemblance with the one on the screenshot (except the first character, that's why I scrambled the first characters on the picture).
When I enter the right password it logs me in, but some half-way, it still shows "Not signed in" and "Turn on sync"
But for a while it actually works: I can later access the results of my browsing (history, saved passwords, etc) on other devices. I can watch Youtube from my account and it all lasts for some time. I am not sure about the longevity, it seems that when I actively do something on my Google account (like watching Youtube, for example) I stay logged in, but after some inactive time I have to log in again. And it becomes very annoying.
So I have tried some times to solve my problem, Googled many times. I have tried:
- set "Allow third-party cookies"
- set "Allow Chromium sign-in" and disable and set
- set "Allow sites to save data on your device"
- removed saved user/password from saved passwords. Now I don't see this scrambled sequence anymore, but Chromium does not offer to save my password neither does not use one I added myself into the manager.
I have not:
- removed all cookies
- removed whole config-directory
- recreate your Google account in Ubuntu settings. Go to Settings ⇾ Online accounts ⇾ Google - delete it then set it up once again.
I have no other Google-profiles under my system user/account.
I'd like to not remove my conf/cookies unless it is absolutely necessary, I still hope someone has a solution for my situation. Besides "why" stated in the title I am certainly interested in fixing too.
Edit
Added chrome://signin-internals/ screen. Is here something wrong?
I do not think there is much that you can do.
https://blog.chromium.org/2021/01/limiting-private-api-availability-in.html
Chromium no longer supports the Google Sync API.
Sync Chromium with a Google account does not work any more … solutions?
There are some workarounds that various people have been able to get to work. You might find an answer here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/67459316/enabling-chromium-to-sync-with-google-account#:~:text=Google%20announced%20that%20from%20March,with%20a%20Google%20Account.