Chromium for Windows

So, Chromium vs Google Chrome. Get it? Google Chrome is a customized browser built by Google, which was taken from the open source project, Chromium. Google has added a whole load of its own hooks into Chrome, allowing for Google to gather a stack of information about the user of Google Chrome.

If you are not paranoid about your browsing activities being "monitored", then you can continue using Google Chrome. For those who prefer not to disclose their browsing activities to Google, it would be highly recommended to use the Chromium browser instead. So, the question is, "Where can I download the Chromium browser for Windows?". Keep reading.

There is no real official installer .exe created for Chromium. All current and past build of Chromium (and future builds which are to come) are stored in the Chromium nightly build repository. In this link you would find folders named by numbers, which represent the build number of the Chromium browser. A current stable build is Chromium 20, i.e. build folder 136319. All builds beyond this build number are for Chromium 21, which is still in progress - so, as much as you could download and use the newer builds, there might be risks that something(s) might be broken. Any how, if there is a problem with one version, you could always download and try another.

Since there is no installer for Chromium, you would need to perform a couple of manual steps in order to set things up (these steps apply if you are attempting to upgrade/downgrade Chromium as well). So, here goes:

1. In the build folder, download the file "chrome-win32.zip".
2. After the download completes, unzip the contents of the zip file to your Program Files folder (if you are using a 64-bit Windows OS, you would need to unzip to the "Program Files (x86)" folder).
3. Traverse into this folder and double-click the chrome.exe file to launch the Chromium browser. (Don't be misled with the fact that the exe file name is "chrome" - it is not the same as Google Chrome)

The Chromium browser should have launch successfully and the look and feel should be very much similar to Google Chrome. At this point you can also add any extension from the Chrome Web Store as they are fully compatible with Chromium (as they are with Google Chrome).

After launching the Chromium browser by running the chrome.exe file earlier, a couple of operations happened in the background to get Chromium set up for use on Windows. You would find that:

1. a shortcut for the Chromium browser has been created on your desktop
2. a registry entry was created at “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Chromium”
3. the following directories were created (depending on the OS you are using):
• on Windows 7, the folder "C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Chromium" would 
• on Windows XP , the folder “C:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\Chromium” would have been created

Updating Chromium

Chromium doesn’t have a built in mechanism of looking for updates and upgrading itself. So, it is a manula process of upgrading Chromium. To change the version of Chromium (upgrade/downgrade), just follow the same steps (Steps 1-3) above.

If you do not like Chromium or if you want to stop using it, all you would need to do is to go to the folder containing Chromium (in the folder "Program Files" or "Program Files(x86)") and remove/delete the folder completely. If you are an advanced user, you can also remove the folder created by Chromium in your applications data folder and also remove the registry entry (both should have been created automatically by the application).

There you go. Those are the steps on how to use Chromium on Windows.