Is chromium worth it (comparing package sizes)?

Silmano · n00b Joined: 10 Mar 2012 Posts: 59

Recently I've installed Chromium in my laptop and I was shocked by the size of the package (~180Mb). At first I though it was because I lacked some dependencies, but pretending to emerge Chrome, I saw Chrome uses a much smaller package (~35Mb).

So I was wondering, is it worth Chromium being +150Mb bigger than Chrome? I don't have problems of space on my laptop but I also don't want huge packages if they do the same as others five times smaller. Hey, even Chrome has PDF and print functions integrated.

Any clue what Chromium has in the extra 150Mb that Chrome doesn't? (apart from the obvious differences)

franzf · Advocate Joined: 29 Mar 2005 Posts: 4565

chromium is the opensource source package - needs compiling. As many other large projects it bundles quite some libs - WebKit, icu, mesa and openssl are the ones that take the most space.
google-chrome is the binary app from google. It contains pepperflash, the NaCl-flash-plugin maintained by google (AFAIK). It is binary so you don't know excatly what google did in order to get your private data

(I am sure if such a if they did so it would have already been detected)
chromium takes QUITE some time to compile (mostly due to WebKit...) so google-chrome may be an alternative.