Everyone knows about the Chrome web browser but not many people know about the open-source Chromium web browser. The two web browser are actually the one and same with only a few small differences. One of the obvious difference between the two web browsers is that the Chromium is an open-source web browser while Chrome is Google’s proprietary web browser. Another difference comes from the same fact, Chrome contains many Google related features that cannot be found in Chromium. And the third most important difference is that Chromium is not available in a stable release build – it is available only in developer or canary builds.
While some people prefer Chrome web browser, others like to use the Chromium web browser because it lacks Google owned services. Anyway, if you want to install Chromium web browser on Windows 11, then you can follow these steps:
- Download Chromium browser’s latest build from https://download-chromium.appspot.com/. Just click on the download link and it will download a ZIP file containing the latest build.
- Extract the contents of the downloaded ZIP to a folder, for example, in C:\Chromium.
- Find the chrome.exe file among all the files that you have extracted and create a shortcut to it on your Windows desktop. For this, you can select chrome.exe, press Ctrl+C to copy it, right-click anywhere on your desktop and choose Paste shortcut.
- Now you can double-click on the newly created shortcut and you will be running Chromium web browser on your Windows 11 PC.
You can also pin the shortcut to taskbar for easily launching this web browser. Whenever you want to stop using Chromium and remove it from your system, you can simply delete the desktop shortcut and the folder where all the files were extracted in the above steps. You may want to keep the Chromium user profile folder if you want.