Chromium browser review , uses , features , advantages and disadvantages

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

Chromium

Chromium is a superb web browser that is available for Windows , Linux & Mac , To install it on Linux , you should use Linux distribution’s software repositories , Open the Ubuntu Software Center to install it on Ubuntu Linux , To install Chromium on Windows & 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 & 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

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 do not allow proprietary software , So , if you are a normal user you can use chrome/chromium without 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 ) , 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 , Google helps in Chromium development , This ensures the longevity and constant development & improvement of the browser .

Chromium has 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 isn’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 , MP3 .

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 which included , So , there is no HTML5 video support , Updates aren’t as fast to ship as Chrome , Not readily available on Windows and Mac .

Chromium browser does not have the built-in PDF viewer ( which is closed source ) that 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 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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