What’s the difference between Chrome and Chromium? Well, Chromium is the open source part of Chrome, released to open source by Google in 2008. Chromium is available as a standalone browser.
Google’s Chrome browser uses the code from Chromium, and adds some proprietary features:
- a built-in Flash player (yes, that’s right – Flash is built-in to Chrome)
- a built-in PDF viewer
- AAC and MP3 audio support
- an auto-updater
- option to report crashes to Google
- option to report usage stats to Google
- Google branding
- RLZ reporting, telling Google from where Chrome was downloaded
You can see a table of differences here: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/ChromiumBrowserVsGoogleChrome.