Chromium

Chromium 4.0.266.0 displaying Wikipedia on Windows 7
Stable release	None [+/−]
Preview release	4.0.273.0  (2009-12-16; 18 hours ago) [+/−]
Written in	C++ and Assembly
Operating system	Windows (XP SP2 and later) Mac OS X (10.5 and later) Linux
Size	19.9 MB (Linux) 18.4 MB (Mac) 11.8 MB (Windows)
Type	Web browser
License	BSD license, MIT License, LGPL, Ms-PL, MPL/GPL/LGPL tri-license
Website	www.chromium.org dev.chromium.org

Chromium is the open source web browser on which Google Chrome is based.^[1] The Google-authored portion of it is released under the BSD license,^[2] with other parts being subject to a variety of different permissive open-source licenses, including the MIT License, the LGPL, the Ms-PL, and an MPL/GPL/LGPL tri-license.^[3] It implements the same feature set as Google Chrome, but has a slightly different logo.^[4] Versions of Mac and Linux Google Chrome based on Chromium were released to the development channel for Google Chrome on 4 June 2009.^[5] According to the developer documentation, "'Chromium' is the name of the project, not the product, and should never appear in code in variable names, API names etc. Use 'chrome' instead."^[6]

One of the major aims of the project is for Chrome to be a tabbed window manager, or shell for the web, as opposed to it being a traditional browser application. The idea is for the application to be minimalist in the same way Windows Explorer or Mac OSX's Finder are minimalist. The developers state that it "should feel lightweight (cognitively and physically) and fast".^[7]

[edit] Unofficial releases

An early alpha build of Chromium for Linux, which clarifies its separation from Google Chrome

Acid3 test results on Chromium 4.0.264.0.

• On September 15, 2008, CodeWeavers released an unofficial bundle of a Wine derivative and Chromium Developer Build 21 for Linux and Mac OS X, which they dubbed CrossOver Chromium.^[8][9]
• SRWare Iron is a release of Chromium software that explicitly disables the collection and transmission of usage information and enables ad blocking and full User agent control. The Download page has links to Windows, Linux, Mac and USB stick builds which usually follow official builds within a week. There's also a Chrome vs Iron comparison page.
• ChromePlus is a Chromium-based browser for Windows. It adds features such as mouse gestures, link dragging, and IE tabs.^[10]
• It is possible to download and view a pre-release 'snapshot' trunk build of the Mac version of Chromium from the Chromium development website. Although this is not the public release, but rather an internal version for developers, it does allow you to see how far development has progressed and what the browser might eventually look like. Users should be warned that although this is the most advanced development version, it is still only in alpha and may be very unstable. The Mac development status page also has information related to the development of the product. As of June 2009 the Chromium trunk version was tested as being faster than Safari 4.0 Beta, Firefox 3.5 beta 4 and Opera 10.0 Beta on the SunSpider benchmark on Mac OS X ^[11].
• A similar pre-release snapshot of the Linux version is also available, including builds for Debian and Ubuntu and unofficial repo for Fedora.

[edit] See also

Free software portal

• Google Chrome
• Google Chrome OS
• Chromium OS
• Comparison of web browsers
• SRWare Iron

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Chromium website