[EvanAnderson]

It cannot. There are malicious third parties who have made distributions of Chromium that are fully functional browsers, installing in the user's AppData folder w/o Administrator rights, that have additional "functionality" like exfiltrating browsing history or displaying extra t

This is really what any Electron-based app is. It's just Chromium running out of the AppData folder. There's a whole ecosystem of "shadow IT" software that installs out of the AppData folder, meant to end-run IT and central control, that functions great w/o Administrator rights.

[jlarocco]

I'm not doubting that there are malicious third parties distributing them, but Google themselves delivers Chromium that way:

https://download-chromium.appspot.com/

It's linked from the main chromium site:

https://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/download-chromium/

[3eb7988a1663]

I thought that was a pretty common pattern now for a variety of software tools. Was pretty sure that Chrome + Firefox did not need administrator privileges to be available to a user.

[red_admiral]

This one is usually ok? https://chromium.woolyss.com/ It's sort of like official unofficial download place.