# Diff btwn 'google-chrome' and 'chromium' packages? [SOLVED]

## dufeu

I've been using the 'www-client/chromium' package for quite a long time now. Recently, it seems that the '36.0' series has been updated frequently, sometimes as often as 2x a week. Most of my PCs are still i686 (or atom) based so compiling 'chromium' on these machines is not a trivial use of time.

I've been looking at using 'www-client/google-chrom-beta' since it's a binary package install rather than a compilation install for these machines. What I'm wondering are what differences may exist between them.

Since the 'google-chrome-beta' has USE='plugins' as the only listed available USE option, which (if any) of the USE options [bindist cups custom-cflags gnome gnome-keyring kerberos neon pulseaudio selinux +tcmalloc test] available in 'chromium' are included?

Currently, I install 'www-client/chromium' with USE="cups kerberos pulseaudio tcmalloc". I'm concerned here that any plugins I have that chrome calls be compatible with google-chrome.

When I originally went with 'chromium' rather than 'google-chrome', 'chromium' was supposed to be open source only while 'google-chrome' could contain proprietary code as well. In other words, 'google-chrome' contained pieces of code not available in 'chromium'. Is this still true?

I plan on continuing to emerge and update 'chromium' on my faster PCs, but was seriously thinking of changing my re-purposed and older PCs to simply pull and install the binary version of Chrome.

Any 'gotchas' I should be aware of?

Thanks!

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## chithanh

The beta channel of chromium and chrome gets updated quite often, there is no way around it. If you want to stay with the stable version on an otherwise unstable system, then you can put

```
www-client/chromium -~x86 (or -~amd64)
```

google-chrome and google-chrome-beta are not built by Gentoo, but are just repackaged binaries that were released by Google. You can visit chrome://version/ to check which options Google built Chrome with.

Enabling USE="plugins" will allow system installed plugins with chrome. To get the same proprietary plugins as chrome, emerge chrome-binary-plugins when you have chromium installed.

There may be a performance difference between the precompiled and optimized code, especially on the Atom system. You could use a browser benchmark like Octane to test.

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## dufeu

Thank you. I appreciate the info!

You answer tells me everything I need to know and also how to keep up with the binary options myself.

 :Wink: 

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