Chromium Browser Download For Windows 2021

Chromium browser is an open-source web browser project that aims to build a safer, faster, and more stable way for all Internet users to experience the web. It is the open-source web browser project from which Google Chrome draws its source code. Chromium builds have the most infrastructure for analyzing crashes and reporting bugs. The project’s hourly Chromium snapshots appear essentially similar to the latest builds of Google Chrome aside from the omission of certain Google additions, most noticeable among them: Google’s brand, auto-update mechanism, click-through licensing terms, usage-tracking, and bundling of Adobe Flash Player.

What is the Chromium browser?

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 this web browser 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 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, which is Chromium rebranded (name and logo) with very few additions such as user tracking & an auto-updater system.

Chromium web browser 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.

Differences between Chromium and Google Chrome

Chromium browser is the name given to the open-source project and the browser source code released and maintained by the Chromium Project. It is possible to install the latest precompiled snapshots for Windows, Linux and Mac, or by downloading the source code and building it manually on those platforms.

Google takes this source code and adds an integrated Flash Player, the Google name and logo, an auto-updater system called GoogleUpdate, an opt-in option for users to send Google their usage statistics and crash reports as well as, in some instances, RLZ tracking which transmits information in encoded form to Google, for example, when and where Chrome has been downloaded. By default, Chromium only supports Vorbis, Theora and WebM codecs for the HTML5 audio and video tags, while Google Chrome browser supports these in addition to H.264, AAC, and MP3. Certain Linux distributions may add support for other codecs to their customized versions of Chromium.

Chromium Browser 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 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 pages, 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.

This web 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 chrome web browser 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.

Features of Chromium Browser

• Tabs
• Tab Movement
• Design
• Throbber
• Window Frame
• Omnibox
• Input Types
• Tab to Search
• Result Types
• Incognito
• New Tab Page
• Most Visited
• Frequent Searches
• Recent Bookmarks
• Recently Closed Tabs
• Downloads
• Shelf
• Browse
• Bookmarks
• Adding
• Editing
• Bookmarks Bar
• History
• Browse
• Search Results
• Toolbar
• UI elements
• Visual design
• Status Bubble
• Find in Page
• Options
• Hung Renderer Dialog (someone needs to write this)
• Visual Design

Chromium Browser FAQs

Can you please un-hide old security bugs?

The goal is to open security bugs to the public once the bug is fixed and the fix has been shipped to a majority of users. However, many vulnerabilities affect products besides Chromium, and we don’t want to put users of those products unnecessarily at risk by opening the bug before fixes for the other affected products have shipped.

Therefore, we make all security bugs public within approximately 14 weeks of the fix landing in the Chromium repository. The exception to this is in the event of the bug reporter or some other responsible party explicitly requesting anonymity or protection against disclosing other particularly sensitive data included in the vulnerability report (e.g. username and password pairs).

Can I get advance notice about security bugs?

Vendors of products based on Chromium, distributors of operating systems that bundle Chromium, and individuals and organizations that significantly contribute to fixing security bugs can be added to a list for earlier access to these bugs. You can email us at security@chromium.org to request to join the list if you meet the above criteria. In particular, vendors of anti-malware, IDS/IPS, vulnerability risk assessment, and similar products or services do not meet this bar.

Please note that the safest version of Chrome/Chromium is always the latest stable version — there is no good reason to wait to upgrade, so enterprise deployments should always track the latest stable release. When you do this, there is no need to further assess the risk of Chromium vulnerabilities: we strive to fix vulnerabilities quickly and release them often.

What if a Chrome component breaks an OS security boundary?

If Chrome or any of its components (e.g. updater) can be abused to perform a local privilege escalation, then it may be treated as a valid security vulnerability.

Running any Chrome component with higher privileges than intended is not a security bug and we do not recommend running Chrome as an Administrator on Windows, or as root on POSIX.

Does executing JavaScript from a bookmark mean there’s an XSS vulnerability?

No. Chromium allows users to create bookmarks to JavaScript URLs that will run on the currently-loaded page when the user clicks the bookmark; these are called bookmarklets.

Are PDF files static content in Chromium?

No. PDF files have some powerful capabilities including invoking printing or posting form data. To mitigate abuse of these capabilities, such as beaconing upon document opening, we require interaction with the document (a “user gesture”) before allowing their use.

Alternatives

• Mozilla Firefox
• Google Chrome
• Brave
• Vivaldi
• Opera
• Waterfox
• Pale Moon
• Firefox Developer Edition
• Ungoogled Chromium
• Microsoft Edge

Technical Specification

Version	2021
File Size	173 MB
Languages	English
License	Freeware
Developer	Google