Chromium

Chromium is a sleek, lightweight browser that provides an efficient browsing experience with no unnecessary clutter. We’ve always been Firefox loyalists ourselves, but Chromium impressed us quite a bit.

To the uninitiated, Chromium’s interface may seem rather sparse. There aren’t a lot of buttons, and we were momentarily confused by its lack of a search box. With a bit of exploration, though, we soon caught on. We easily imported our bookmarks and other settings from Firefox, allowing us to make a pretty seamless transition. We loved that the search box and address bar are combined into one space; they worked surprisingly well that way. The fact that opening a new tab or window shows a grid of the user’s most-visited Web sites is ingenious; getting to your favorite Web destinations has never been faster or easier. In fact, everything about Chromium is fast, from its start-up to the way it handles Web pages. The program’s Help file directs users to Google’s Chrome Web site, which is fine, as the programs are virtually identical.

Transitioning to a new browser always requires an adjustment period, but overall, we found Chromium to be quite intuitive and pleasurable to use. We didn’t have to do a lot of searching for the features that we wanted and, even though it’s relatively no-frills, we didn’t find ourselves missing anything. Chromium is free. It comes as a zip file and runs after extraction with no need to install. We highly recommend this program to all users.