Chromium (Web Browser)

★★★☆☆

The basis for most web browsers out there today, driven primarily by Google for building Chrome.

As a stand-alone browser it’s not exactly Chrome minus Google (that would be Ungoogled Chromium), but it doesn’t have all the Google branding, tracking, attempts to funnel you into their services…or support for proprietary media.

Not Entirely Stable

It’s effectively the in-development version of Chrome, which means if you just download it from the project website, it’s not always stable. And it doesn’t auto-update. They really don’t make it easy and would rather you test things with a proper Chrome beta or “canary” build.

In short, you probably don’t want to use it as your primary browser…at least not on Windows or macOS.

Better on Linux

Major Linux distributions (Fedora, for instance) do include stable versions of Chromium in their software repositories. There’s a Flatpak (and probably a Snap) for other distros.

Though it’s still visibly slower than Vivaldi on my system.

Google Connections

I thought I remembered syncing Chromium with Chrome for a while a few years back, but that doesn’t seem to be possible anymore. I couldn’t get version 132 on Debian to sign in, and version 133 on Fedora doesn’t even offer the feature.

It does include features like safe browsing (which can check downloads or URLs against Google for malware) and the new advertising topics (tracking in the browser) (which was the final straw for me to ditch Chrome and switch to Vivaldi) so you’ll still want to fine-tune your settings as to what you are and aren’t willing to send.

Extensions

Chromium is hooked up to the regular Chrome Web Store and you can install just about anything. Floccus works just fine for syncing bookmarks, and KeePassXC-Browser works for filling passwords – if you’re using native packages for both KeePass and Chromium. (It’s a pain to get native messaging running through a Flatpak or Snap, and I still haven’t managed to get it to work on my system.)

Bottom Line

Chromium is a great, versatile engine. As a browser itself, even the stable Linux packages still feel like a first draft with placeholders for things like syncing. Google fills in those placeholders for Chrome. Vivaldi, Opera, Brave, etc. fill them in for their own browsers. Vivaldi is my current favorite of these, followed by Falkon on low-spec hardware