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by hedora 3453 days ago
I'm surprised people still use Chrome and not Chromium. Perhaps a few devs in your situation could improve the Chromium installation flow for Windows, etc.

Google doesn't have much incentive to make it easy, but third parties (like Debian) do, and do a lot of the heavy lifting on an ongoing basis.

2 comments

why are you surprised? most people don't care about stuff like this. most people don't use ad nauseum. most people don't even use ad block.
I can't even figure out how to install a stable version of Chromium. I only spent two minutes trying, but installing Chrome consists of one web search and one button click, so the difference is pretty obvious to me.
Here's a (macOS-specific) guide, unfortunately it still requires basic knowledge of the Terminal and a working installation of Ruby.

http://macappstore.org/chromium/

> it still requires...a working installation of Ruby.

Does OS X/macOS not still come with a bundled installation of Ruby? Or is the version it comes with too old to use with brew/brew cask?

I believe it does, but I don't usually use it; rather, I usually get Ruby Version Manager to manage one or more Ruby runtimes on my Mac. Therefore I can't vouch for it to work with brew and/or brew cask.
I thought for sure this was an exaggeration but you are absolutely correct. I couldn't find anything in two minutes either.

I have Chromium installed on a my Ubuntu desktop but I think I had to add a PPA to get it.

No PPA necessary: http://packages.ubuntu.com/yakkety/web/chromium-browser

Most of the more-or-less mainstream distros ship Chromium in their standard repos. In fact, they're more likely to ship Chromium than Chrome due to the fact that the former is FOSS and the latter is not.

Neither macOS nor Windows have such a philosophy of "prioritize the FOSS alternative", so Chrome is unsurprisingly the better-supported option there.

> Most of the more-or-less mainstream distros ship Chromium in their standard repos. In fact, they're more likely to ship Chromium than Chrome due to the fact that the former is FOSS and the latter is not.

That's actually how I first started using Chromium early in my Linux days; I didn't really know the difference between Chrome and Chromium, so I just picked the one that was easier to install. Once I finally learned the difference, I consciously made the choice to use Chromium on all of my systems, even the non-Linux ones.