Chromium vs Chrome
What Google actually adds when it turns Chromium into Chrome, feature by feature, and which of those pieces you can get back in a third-party build.
Chromium is the open-source browser project. Chrome is Google's product built from it. Roughly 95 per cent of the code is shared, so nearly everything you notice about using the browser is identical. The differences sit around the edges, and most of them exist for licensing or business reasons rather than technical ones.
What Chrome adds
An automatic updater. Chrome installs security fixes silently in the background. Chromium has no updater at all. This is the single most consequential difference and the one people most often overlook.
Widevine DRM. Netflix, Spotify, Amazon Prime and Disney+ all require it. It is proprietary and closed source, so official Chromium builds cannot ship it. Some third-party builds bundle it anyway.
Proprietary media codecs. H.264 and AAC are patent-encumbered. Google licenses them for Chrome, but that licence does not extend to anyone compiling Chromium. Open Chromium builds therefore ship only the free codecs, which is why some video appears broken.
Google API keys. Sign-in, sync, Safe Browsing lookups and translation all authenticate against Google services with keys baked into the binary. Chromium builds without keys cannot use those services.
Crash and usage reporting. Chrome sends crash dumps and, if enabled, usage statistics to Google.
A stable release process. Chrome releases move through canary, dev, beta and stable with real testing at each stage. Chromium's own automated builds get none of that.
What Chromium keeps
Everything that makes the browser what it is: the Blink rendering engine, the V8 JavaScript engine, the sandbox and site isolation, the extensions system and the Chrome Web Store, PDF viewing through PDFium, and DevTools. A Chromium build feels like Chrome because architecturally it is Chrome.
What third-party builds put back
This is the part that confuses people. "Chromium" is not one thing in practice, because the maintainers listed on this site each restore a different subset:
- Codecs and Widevine are commonly compiled back in. Hibbiki, Marmaduke, Thorium and RobRich all do it.
- API keys are sometimes included, so sign-in works. Hibbiki and Supermium do this.
- Nobody adds an updater. That remains the real gap.
So "does Chromium play Netflix" has no single answer. It depends entirely on which build you downloaded, which is why picking the right one matters more than the Chromium-versus-Chrome question itself.
Which should you use?
Use Chrome if you want something that maintains itself and you do not mind Google's integrations.
Use a Chromium build if you want the same engine without Google's services attached, you want a portable install that touches nothing on the system, or you specifically want an ungoogled variant. Accept in exchange that keeping it updated is now your job.