Chromium Browser: Open Source Web Browser For Your Netbook

Chromium is an open-source browser designed to focus on building a safer, faster and a reliable browser for the users to experience the web.  Chromium is an open source code released by Google along with V8 JavaScript engine which is now maintained by Chromium project. Chromium was released in the year September 2009 with an advanced JavaScript engine and Omnibox, with different user-selectable themes. The fundamental goals of this open source project (Chromium browser) are to help drive the web forward.

To increase the speed of the browser, to load and to retrieve the resource from the particular target Chromium uses V8 JavaScript engine. The V8 design was considered to convert the JavaScript (machine code) to native code and to find faster object and small garbage collection pauses for efficient memory management. It introduces hidden classes and inline caches to speed up the property access and function calls.

Along with V8 JavaScript engine, benchmark suite applications were implemented for well-structures object-based applications with abstraction layers and property access. Benchmark suite is a stand-alone JavaScript application which is modularized as delta blue, crypto, ray trace and early Boyer.

Real Difference: Google Chrome and Chromium

• Chromium browser supports Vorbis, Theora and WebM codecs for HTML5 audio and video tags, while Google chrome supports these in addition to H.264, AAC and MP3.
• Chromium browser cannot be updated until a newer version of open-source code is released, where as Google chrome can be easily upgraded from the older version to newer version.
• Certain API’s, extensions and add-ons of Google browser cannot be installed into chromium such as themes, news reader, mail box, RSS feeds.

Some of the features of chromium are:

Strict-Transport-Security

A highly secured website informs the browser to be contacted over secured connection only and not providing a weak connection. Hence the chromium browser tries to connect the site through HTTPS and will treat all HTTPS errors as hard stops. This feature helps the browser’s defense against attackers to a large extent.

CSRF Protection via Origin Header

A header called Origin is new HTML5 features that aid to defend user’s site against cross-site request forgery attacks (CSRF). Cross-site request forgery attack instructs the user to send a request to HTTP request to confuse the targeted server.

Reflective XSS Protection

Chromium Browsers are free of cross-site scripting vulnerabilities. The XSS filter checks whether a script that about to be run on a web page is also present in the request that fetched that web page. If the script is present in the request, then it is a strong sign that the web server is tricked.