What is Chromium?

Chromium is the open source project that serves as the foundation for Google Chrome. Think of Chromium as the bleeding edge version of Chrome created by the open source community. However, Chromium is not for everyone. It’s not nearly as polished or bug-free as Chrome, and while Chrome silently updates itself in the background, Chromium has to be updated manually (and there a new builds available almost every day). The process of updating to the latest build of Chromium is made easier by tools such as Chromium Updater

One reason to consider using Chromium over Chrome is security. While Google promises that Chrome isn’t reporting back to Google with any additional data about your browsing habits — at last no more than any other Web browser — you may not completely trust Google in that regard. The company has too much to benefit from gathering as much data as possible from every single user. Because Chromium is open source, if there was any kind of supposedly-harmless data collection going on, the open source coders would likely spot it and alert the community and the public. That, and the extra speed boost from running the cutting edge software builds, are what are some things to consider about using Chromium..


If you are using Mozilla Firefox (I quit using Firefox months ago) then checking out Chromium will likely result in faster, more efficient browsing.