Open source web browser for a safer, faster, and more stable way to experience the Internet

Chromium is the application that serves as the foundation for Chrome, with Google’s developers improving the software and adding a bunch of enhancements to make it worthy of the Google badge.

However, Chromium isn’t too far off the application that was thrown in the battle against Firefox and Internet Explorer. Chromium is actually a lighter Chrome that provides almost the same performance and functionality as Google’s tool.

The interface is identical to Chrome’s and in addition, it has the exact options as its more popular brother, as well as extension and theme support.  While the assymetries between the two browsers are not that many, the ones that do apply make quite a difference. Unlike Chromium, Chrome also comes with an integrated flash player, the company’s autoupdate function that’s being used in many downloadable tools plus some other improvements to help the software rise up to the expectations.

Despite the contrasts between the two, Chromium is actually a pretty fast browsing solution. It's true that its simplicity may not captivate the whole crowd and some users might feel the need for some features that are only available in Google's very own tool.

After the tests we performed, we came down to one conclusion: it is only up to you and your needs. In case you’re looking for a simple web browser that helps you do just that, browse the Internet, then this might be a great tool for you.

Chromium is an open source web browser that was designed in order to provide for all users a safer, faster and more stable way to experience the web.

In the long term, we think of Chromium as a tabbed window manager or shell for the web rather than a browser application. We avoid putting things into our UI in the same way you would hope that Apple and Microsoft would avoid putting things into the standard window frames of applications on their operating systems.

The tab is our equivalent of a desktop application's title bar; the frame containing the tabs is a convenient mechanism for managing groups of those applications. In future, there may be other tab types that do not host the normal browser toolbar.

Enhanced functionality through HTML 5: offline modes, background processing, notifications, and more.
Better access points and discovery: On Chromium-based browsers, we've addressed the access point issue by allowing applications to install shortcuts on your desktop.
While the tab bar is sufficient to access existing tabs, we are creating a new primary access point that provides a list of frequently used applications and tools.
Search as a primary form of navigation
Chromium's address bar and the Quick Search Box have simplified the way you access personal content and the web.

While we're not a natively-themed application, we do wish to fit within the operating system so that our app doesn't look out of place. This affects our choices of:
- interface icons (Vista makes frequent use of a certain back/forward icon style)
- color
- perceived depth, thickness
- border shape, width and styling
- font choice
- blurriness - Windows tends to be more bitmappy than OS X, preferring to align everything along pixel boundaries

Single-word searches are hard for us to distinguish from single-word URLs - previous solutions have relied on synchronous DNS lookups to figure out if a user was typing a single-word URL, but such lookups add an unreasonable overhead to the search experience and don't always lead to an expected result. For example, if you wish to look up what 'localhost' means, but you have a local webserver running, the result can be infuriating.

In Chromium, we decided that consistency and speed was best, and given that the range of 'single-word inputs meant as searches' dwarfs the number of 'single-word inputs meant as URLs', we default to displaying web search results while doing a background DNS lookup to figure out if a local host exists - if it does, we display a "Did you mean http://input/"

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