Chromium browser review, uses, features, advantages and disadvantages

Chromium is completely open source, unlike Google Chrome. It supports almost all of Google Chrome’s features, syncs between devices, offers great built-in developer tools, installs extensions without a restart, contains a combined text bar for entering URLs and searching, and has superb HTML5 compatibility like Chrome.

Chromium

Chromium is a superb web browser available for Windows, Linux, and Mac. To install it on Linux, you should use the Linux distribution’s software repositories. Open the Ubuntu Software Center to install it on Ubuntu Linux. To install Chromium on Windows and Mac, you should download the official Chromium builds. The option of automatic updating will not be available.

Chromium browser can allow Linux distributions which require open-source software to package up the web browser that is identical to Chrome and ship it to their users, If you are into open-source software and try to avoid any closed-source bits, Chromium is a good option for you.

Chromium browser looks exactly like Google Chrome on the surface, Like Chrome, the only real differences are what the browser has under the hood, Chromium doesn’t come with a lot of the things that Chrome ships with such as video codecs and other things, Chromium has a release process exception, which allows the team to upload Chromium build as soon as a new upstream release is made. 

Chromium browser

A new reason to use Chromium, rather than Chrome, Chromium does not prevent you from using third-party extensions, Google Chrome now totally blocks all extensions that are not directly from their Chrome AP store, You can install Chromium browser just downloading it from https://download-chromium.appspot.com/.

Chromium does not allow proprietary software, So, if you are a normal user you can use Chrome/chromium without a difference, Chromium serves as a base for Google Chrome, that is Chromium rebranded (name and logo) with very few additions such as user tracking & an auto-updater system.

Chromium tracks whatever you write in the address bar by default, sending all queries to Google (or the default search engine, which will store them for 14 days if you’re not logged in), It tracks the name of the files you’re downloading and other things that Firefox does too.

Chromium advantages

Chromium can access to Chrome‘s extensions, It can access the Chrome Web Store and almost all of the extensions hosted there can be installed & used on Chromium, It is backed by Google, and Google helps in Chromium development, This ensures the longevity and constant development and improvement of the browser.

Chromium has a powerful developer console, It allows JavaScript, CSS debugging, and code formatting out of the box with support for source maps when viewing minified code, Chromium browser is a default browser for a lot of Linux distributions & for those that aren’t available through official repositories for easy downloading.

Chromium is an open source and without proprietary codecs, It is free, The browser is more widely available on Linux than Chrome and it contains nearly all of Google features shipped with Chrome.

Chromium disadvantages

Chromium browser eats a lot of RAM such as Chrome, which can be a problem for machines with less RAM, It does not support certain common media formats and some codecs such as AAC, H.264, and MP3.

The search dialog disappears with each new page, If you try to search for the occurrence of a word or phrase on multiple web pages, for each new page you need to bring up a Find dialog again, If you choose to enable crash reporting in Chrome, The information about crashes will be sent to Google, If you use Chromium, this crash reporter isn’t present.

There are no proprietary codecs included, So, there is no HTML5 video support, Updates aren’t as fast to ship as Chrome is not readily available on Windows and Mac.

Chromium browser does not have the built-in PDF viewer (which is closed source) which is the most certainly convenient to be able to pull up a PDF document right in your browser, It is a good browser but it could never replace Google Chrome.

Chromium browser supports very poor multimedia, not just Netflix, it lacks a decent version of Adobe’s Flash plugin, with chromium, The individuals will be missing new plugins, such as Google Cloud Print, Chrome PDF reader, etc.

Google notes that some Linux distributions may disable Chromium’s security sandbox, so, you’ll want to navigate to the sandbox in Chromium to ensure the sandbox is enabled and functioning by default, This is one of Chromium (and Chrome’s) best features.

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