[jptman]

I wonder if this has anything to do with the rumoured 4k Chromecast. I wouldn't be surprised if they have some interesting tech to support it they don't want to make public.

Edit: Nevermind, it looks like Chrome lately has built-in support for Chromecast (I see it under the menu as Cast). From this, I can surmise a couple of things:

1. Google wants users to be able to use a chromecast out of the box without installing an extension. Can't fault them for that because believe it or not, not everyone knows how to do that. Or there's some limitation I don't know about in extensions that they want to get around.

2. This means that Google would either have to open-source the Chromecast functionality in the browser, or it has to maintain both the functionality baked into Chrome and the browser extension. So, they'd have to keep supporting a browser extension they'd not need for Chrome just to support Chromium.

I don't know.. May be a good compromise if possible would've been to bundle Chrome with the chromecast extension. But I doubt when someone came up with the idea of bundling Chromecast in the browser for purpose X, someone else in the team said: But think of Chromium!