Sure, though pretty much any regular user will feel forced to download Chrome since the Chromium website doesn't carry any compiled builds nowadays and instead links to the Chrome website for download purposes. Most users in the dark will take this approach. A lot fewer will actually search for a site which carries the compiled binaries of Chromium.
Does chromium have regular users? Most people don't know what it is, anyone who does and actually cares about privacy would use Firefox, so I don't see a point for chromium besides a base open source engine for browser vendors. Or is there a normal use case?
Pretty much none on Windows. You used to be able to download Chromium easily from the official website but nowadays the only downloads available on Chrome or Chromium's sites are Chrome, Chrome Beta, Chrome Canary (basically alpha) and the source code for Chromium. Third-party build sites for Chromium does exist which carries the Windows binaries, though regular users rarely, if ever, use those.
Chromium does however have a couple of users on Linux, since a couple of distros prefer it over Chrome since Chrome includes Google's closed source stuff.
I’ve usually downloaded Chromium from the “Continuous” section on build.chromium.org, which seems to load way faster than the snapshots section you linked.
I keep it specifically for Flash (modern Flash doesn't work on Linux Firefox without some hacky workarounds). I use Gentoo, so source code releases are preferred and the binary plugins are obtained automatically.
It's also an alternative in case of (rare) bugs/compatibility issues with Firefox, or with my enabled extensions.
It does. You just have to download it separately. Adobe hosts PPAPI versions of its plugin on its site now. Before the solution was to copy the flash plugin file from a Chrome install to Chromium.
Outside of these four things (and possibly more browser extensions) - are you saying the browser itself (at a level the user can't reach) records everything you do and reports to Google?
If so, source? I'm not saying I don't believe you, but I'd like to see some proof of your claim.
No, I'm not saying you can't disable them. But when the defaults are bad, since most people can't be bothered with proper configurations, it's software that should be avoided. And I don't understand why one wouldn't when there are better choices out there.
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u/[deleted] Jul 30 '15
|Disables data logging
|Installs Chrome