As a result, Vivaldi is currently popular among advanced users and geeks. Unhappy with the direction Opera took after moving from its own Presto engine to Chromium’s Blink, they decided to create a new browser that reintroduces many of the features and functions removed from Opera. It was created by a former founder and CEO of the original Opera. Vivaldi is the newest big player in the browser market with the stable version released in April 2016. Importantly, the browsers can still directly or indirectly install extensions from the Chrome store, any that can’t were not included. Here we list seven browsers based on Chromium and the Blink engine that have a bigger feature set and more options than the browser they are developed around. We’re more interested in looking at a browser that enhances the features and functions over and above the standard Chromium, such as built in ad blocking, mouse gestures, better tab/download/ bookmark management or even something unique like a built in VPN or DNS encryption. There are several functions built into Chromium and Chrome already but today’s internet user often needs more, which has to be taken care of with extensions.Ī number of third party Chromium based browsers are really pretty similar to standard and offer a few security or privacy tweaks such as removing communication with Google servers.

Each third party browser developer has its own ideas and either takes things out of Chromium or adds new functions and features in. Chrome has extras like a PDF reader, Flash player, auto updater and multimedia codecs. The two are very similar but Chrome is more like the public version as Chromium is never officially released as a standalone browser. There’s also dozens of smaller third party browsers around to try out. Although Firefox and Chromium are both open source, the majority of third party browsers are based around Chromium and the Blink engine.Ĭhromium is the browser project from Google that Chrome is based around. There are really three main browser brand names, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer/Edge, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome/Chromium. One of the most important pieces of software you will use on your computer is going to be the web browser.

Firefox using alot of memory