Chromium

Chromium is the open source version of Google's Chrome web browser. It features a minimal user interface, powerful web development tools, and a built in task manager. The Chromium Project is at the forefront of implementing new web standards.

Because Chromium is open source it is legally unable to include several features that the proprietary Google Chrome browser includes by default. Namely automatic updates and the integration of Adobe's Flash Player. A complete list of the differences can be found in the chromium repository.

Linguas
There are many linguas available via USE_EXPAND in Chromium. So many, in fact, that the Wiki cannot display all of them. For a full list of linguas run:

Emerge
After setting USE flags as desired, Chromium with the following command:

Chrome URLs
Much like Firefox, Chromium has many internal Chrome URLs (special pages) that are used for additional configuration, troubleshooting, task management, etc. An exhaustive list of special pages can be accessed by navigating to:

Prominent special pages include:


 * - Shows enabled components and provides a button to check for updates for each of them. It is sometimes necessary to manually update the PPAPI Adobe flash module via this interfaces when using Chrome.
 * - Displays the About page which includes version information.
 * - A page to manage extensions.
 * - Enable/disable experimental features.
 * - Displays special information about the Adobe Flash Player (if it is accessible by Chromium).
 * - Displays web history. Also accessible through the sandwich menu or by pressing +.
 * - Measure the memory usage of the browser and per-tab usage.
 * - Lots of information on network connections.
 * - Shows a list of plugins. Enable/disable them from this interface.
 * - Displays more version information than the  page.

Adobe Flash not working?
Because Adobe Flash has a proprietary license, Chromium is not able to include flash as part of the source code package. One must install Adobe Flash Player manually. Installing should get Adobe Flash Player working in Chromium.

Tabs crash
Occasionally tabs in Chromium crash. This can be caused by quite a few things, however one of the most common reason for occurrence is that the system is running low on memory. On Gentoo, this can especially happen if the system is compiling a package update while running Chromium.

Out of memory exceptions can really happen when compiling any package that requires a large amount of free memory in order to compile, but since this article is on Chromium and Chromium as a package does a check for 3 GBs of memory to be free it seemed appropriate.

The command can be used to see how much memory is available on the system:

The solution to is to free up memory until the large package compiles have finished. Open a resource monitor of choice and kill applications using large amounts of memory.

External resources

 * http://blog.chromium.org/ - The official Chromium blog.