Chromium supplies most of Google Chrome’s source code. It is Google’s free and open-source browser project and serves as the main codebase from which Chrome is built.
Chrome and Chromium are closely related, but they are not identical products. Chromium provides the browser foundation, while Google Chrome adds proprietary branding and certain Google-distributed components. Depending on the platform and release, those additions can include automatic updating, selected Google service integrations, licensed media codecs, and other features.
The name can cause confusion because both projects contain the Chrome browser’s core technologies. Chromium also includes the Blink rendering engine and Google’s V8 JavaScript engine, and its codebase is reused by browsers such as Microsoft Edge, Opera, Brave, and Vivaldi. Thus, Gecko is associated primarily with Firefox, WebKit began as an important browser engine used by several projects, and Firefox is a separate browser—not Chrome’s source project.