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August 3, 2010

Yet Another Chromium Updater

One of the drawbacks of using Chromium, the open source browser that powers Google Chrome, is that you have to manually update the software. Google offers three channels for early releases: beta, dev and Canary, but you still have to wait up to a week to try the latest features.

Fortunately, it's not very difficult to write a script that downloads the latest Chromium build every 6 hours or every day and then installs it. For example, the URL of the most recent Windows build that passed all the tests is: http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/continuous/LATEST/mini_installer.exe.

Chromium Updater is a Windows application that makes it easier to update Chromium. You can change the update interval, switch to the snapshot channel, which includes the Chromium builds that didn't pass all the tests, use the built-in Flash and PDF plug-ins from an existing Chrome installation. Some of the text from the setup wizard is in German, but the application is in English.


It's important to note that Chromium builds are likely to be buggier and less stable than Google Chrome builds. Chromium also lacks some features that are available in Google Chrome: the built-in Flash and PDF plug-ins, support for H.264 videos, Google branding, automatic updates.

{ via Google Chrome Help Forum }

14 comments:

  1. Not on Linux you don't. Repositories FTW. :P

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  2. I cant see a chromium official repo

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  3. Can this work for Google Chrome too or to Chromium only.

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  4. @sartek
    https://launchpad.net/~chromium-daily/+archive/ppa
    Not official, but it has worked solidly since pretty much the beginning.

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  5. What do you mean H.264 doesn't work on Chromium? Isn't that what the ffmpeg packages are for that come with Chromium in the repos?

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  6. Like Firefox, Chromium doesn't support H.264 because it's a patent encumbered codec.

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  7. The canary build will soon be updated every day, so it's probably more suitable for almost anyone who might want to use this.

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  8. @Alex,

    But the HTML5 YouTube player worked with Chromium, and I assume those videos were not Theora... YouTube videos are encoded using x264 are they not? Is that not H.264 or what?

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  9. @Alex,

    I hadn't even installed the library. Couldn't have been?

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  10. Also the "WEBM" logo didn't appear in the browser at that time.

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  11. Hahaha, stop using Windows and start using Linux.

    I mean, come on.

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  12. This would be more useful as an extension that automatically and silently installs updates, but I'm glad I can finally get Chromium running on Windows!

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  13. @Anonymous: Sure thing.

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