Chromium For Linux

Named after a mineral that plays a key part in maintaining our health as humans, Chromium is so much more than just a browser.

It's a free and open-source project/codebase, mostly maintained by Google, and it serves as the foundation for some of the world's best browsers out there: Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, and so forth.

Even though anyone can use Chromium as the base for building a browser, it's mostly here to allow Google devs to build new versions of Chrome on top of it. Or, it can be used as a standalone, day-to-day browser. But is it any good?

Chromium boasts a sleek, modern-looking GUI very similar to that found on Chrome. Of course, since it doesn't have all the elements that make Chrome what it is today, the GUI is a lot simpler.

You get the same combined search/address bar, almost the same bookmark manager, and you can also group and pin tabs. In short, all the basics of a browser are here.

This is an interesting topic. On one hand, Chromium users can benefit from all the extensions in the Chrome Web Store, translate expressions and words quickly, as well as sync their data across multiple devices, but this is about it.

When compared to most modern browsers, Chrome included, Chromium has a few drawbacks when it comes to features. For example, there's no support for Adobe Flash, updating the app is somewhat of a nightmare since there is no auto-update feature (it's actually easier to uninstall and reinstall it), and there's no horizontal scrolling.

Chromium is without a doubt a very fast browser, sometimes a bit quicker than Chrome. That said, it still suffers from the same underlying problems as Chrome in terms of resource consumption. Chromium is not exactly what one might call a RAM-friendly browser.

It's also not really stable, but that shouldn't come as a surprise for a product that's designed for development purposes.

Not much to be said here. The simple fact that Chromium does not have automatic updates is already a massive drawback. However, Google's safe browsing is bundled within Chromium and is enabled by default, but we all know what that means (some of your browsing data reaches Google for analysis).

This brings us to our next point. It seems that there's somewhat of confusion regarding just how private Chromium is. Indeed, Chromium is an open-source project. Chromium has almost the same privacy statements as Google, however, whether the browser sends as much data to Google as Chrome it's difficult to determine.

People seem to think about Chromium as this "pure" browser with really no ties to Google, and that's somewhat wrong. Thankfully, there something called "ungoogled-chromium" that has all the Google services stripped.

Chromium is a phenomenal base for some of the world's most popular browsers, and as a projects to push the boundaries of development it's wonderful. However, as a browser it's not that good. Yes, it can be used on a day-to-day basis, and yes, you can expand its functionality via extensions.

However, at the end of the day, Chromium is not as stable as Chrome, it has way less features, it still sends some data to Google (just like Chrome), has the same high RAM consumption issues, and no auto-update feature. There's no or very little reason to use it over Chrome, or most other Chromium-based browsers for that matter.