Google Hangouts

For a while now I have been using the Chromium browser in Manjaro Linux on my Pinebook Pro. Recently I discovered that it had two extensions that I had not myself loaded, and which I was unable to remove: Google PDF (to which I have no objection) and Google Hangouts (for which I have no use). The remove buttons for these are greyed out and do not function. There are plenty of other browsers to choose from, but I wondered if there were versions of Chromium available that did not have these extensions compiled in. Any suggestions?

Can’t say if they’re available for your setup, but there’s Firefox, Brave and Vivaldi to look at.

Would stay away from Brave (have been reports of it sideloading crypto/blockchain engines and all sorts of things).

I have always liked Firefox (especially as supports a different engine) but it is starting to integrate tracking specifically to monetise users for ad agencies (from v130 onwards).
So far you can turn these things off but for how long not sure. Thom at OS News keeps a pretty close eye on this.

Lots of Manjaro users appear to recommend vivaldi (chromium based).

link:
https://wiki.manjaro.org/index.php/Internet_Browsers

Librewolf looks promising (so long as has access to the firefox engine it is based on).
I have tried it on windows and it is almost identical in operation (occasional JavaScript issue) to firefox, minus some of the more irritating things eg pocket
There are install instructions for Arch Linux (Manjaro base) so it can probably be persuaded to run on Manjaro:
https://librewolf.net/installation/