Difference Between Chromium and Chrome

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Catchpoint’s Chrome monitor tests are run on Chromium, the open source project that forms the basis of Google Chrome.  There are subtle differences between Chromium and Google Chrome.

The Chrome browser supports the following video and audio codecs (may vary by distro):

  • AAC, H.264, MP3, Opus, Theora, Vorbis, VP8, VP9, and WAV

While Chromium supports:

  • OGG, Opus, PCM, Theora, Vorbis, VP8, VP9, WAV and WEBM by default.

For example, assume a website has the following HTML:

<video>
    <source src='https://cdn.site.com/video.mp4'></source>
    <source codecs='theora, vorbis' src='https://cdn.site.com/video.ogv' type='video/ogv’</source>
</video>

Chrome would load the mp4 file while Chromium would skip the mp4 source and load the ogv.  This may impact metrics such as downloaded bytes and response if the video is not loaded asynchronously, as the ogv file is larger and will take longer to load.  In order to prevent this file from impacting the test results, you can create a request block on the path/file.