Google Chrome and Chromium look very similar and seem related.
How exactly do Google Chrome and Chromium relate to each other, and why are they separate products?
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Sign up to join this communityGoogle Chrome and Chromium look very similar and seem related.
How exactly do Google Chrome and Chromium relate to each other, and why are they separate products?
It would be more correct to state that Chrome is a fork of Chromium.
Chromium is an open source web browser available under many different licenses. Many of them are permissive and allow to use it as part of a closed source application.
Google Chrome is a closed source web browser based on Chromium. However, Google is the driving force between both Chromium and Chrome.
By open-sourcing the core of their web browser, Google allows it to be used as part of pure open-source operating systems. This leads to a wider propagation of their Blink rendering engine which has various strategic advantages for the company. It also opens them up to contributions from the community which saves them development work.
But by having their actual flagship browser a closed source application based on it, they can put additional features into it which would not be allowed in a pure open source application, like inclusion of proprietary plugins (like Adobe Flash) or add features which would be frowned upon in an open source application (like those which submit usage data to Google).