The Chromium Web Browser Might Finally Be Added To Fedora

There are some Fedora packagers/developers working towards potentially getting Google's open-source version of the Chrome web-browser, Chromium, added into Fedora.

Chromium up to this point hasn't been added to Fedora's official repositories since it goes against the policy of the distribution about bundling of system libraries. Chromium ships its own libxml, libjingle, libxslt, minizip, and other libraries rather than making use of any system-wide libraries. Chromium also depends upon FFmpeg, which is a bit legally iffy for Fedora, so they'd prefer using a GStreamer back-end. Samsung has been working on a GStreamer version of Chromium.

While Chromium still ships several of its own libraries, Fedora developers are trying to get the browser added anyways considering Fedora also makes exceptions about the packaging of Mozilla Firefox. In the Firefox case, it's the default browser and "too big" to ignore.

There's this Fedora devel list thread where developers are discussing the possibility of adding Chromium. There may also be interest from other Fedora spins in using it as the default browser over Firefox. There is this upstream Chromium bug report about issues blocking the browser from "making a real release for Linux distros."

For those wanting Chrome/Chromium on Fedora right now, there is this Copr repository and Google's official Chrome RPMs will work on Fedora.