Are Google Chrome and Chromium equivalent for web design/development?

Question

This is probably a silly question, however: from a Web Design/Development point of view (I mean support for web standards and web technologies), could Google Chrome and Chromium be considered equivalent?

I know that they are essentially the same browser, the former being the branded version of the latter, but they also have some functional differences, and Google Chrome features some additions not present in the base Chromium browser (detailed on the Chromium page on Wikipedia).

They use the Blink engine, which is in turn also used by other Chromium-based browsers like MS Edge and Opera; and all these browsers have an uneven support for many different web technologies, as detailed on https://caniuse.com.

I'm working on a Linux machine, and my distro ships Chromium by default, providing it from its standard repo; for the sake of simplicity and keeping things clean, I would prefer to avoid adding another external repo and install Chrome just for this task, if I can rely Chromium to behave exactly the same and not have any compatibility issue.

Like I said, this question is probably silly, but given the differences between other Chromium-based browsers, maybe this doubt of mine could be justified.

EDIT: Please note that I'm not interested in the differences between Google Chrome and Chromium from an user point of view or in details of their history and so on; I only wish to know if from a website development point of view, they are fully compatible or if they support the same set of features. In other words, if I test a site from Chromium, can I be sure that it will work also in Google Chrome? Do they support the same exact set of CSS, JS (and other web-related technologies) features?

Answer 1

Chromium is an open-source browser project that forms the basis for the Chrome web browser. It's maintained by the Chromium Project, while Chrome is maintained by Google. Aside from code-opennes, the main difference (for your concerning question) between the two browsers is that Google adds a number of proprietary features to Chrome like automatic updates and support for additional video formats. Also added is AAC, H.264, and MP3 support. Giving you acess to a wider variety of media content, like sites using HTML5 to stream H.264 videos. Both browsers include Opus, Theora, Vorbis, VP8, VP9, and WAV codecs. Chrome also includes a sandboxed Adobe Pepper API (PPAPI) Flash plug-in that updates along with.

From a programmatic side, both support Google DevTools protocol with all of the flexibility and possibilities this brings, like browser automation using the popular puppeteer Node.js runtime, allowing you to run automated tests either in head or headless environments. Both browsers use the Blink rendering engine and the V8 JavaScript engine, so both will give you same support for CSS, HTML and DOM parsing/rendering, and same JavaScript compatibility, functionality and performance. So the real difference is if you're developing media-content centric web apps, in that case you will benefit more from Chrome since it includes all of the above mentioned extra plugins and supported formats, all of this makes the web more accessible to it and provides a wider range of things you could do.