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Add to SafariWhen comparing Chromium vs qpdfview, the Slant community recommends qpdfview for most people. In the question“What are the best PDF viewers for UNIX-like systems?” qpdfview is ranked 5th while Chromium is ranked 12th.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Cross-platform
Chrome and Chromium are available on almost every device nowadays
Pro Sandboxing
Every tab and plugin runs in its own subprocess so they will never affect the whole browser ,however that consumes more memory than other browsers
Pro Latest Blink
This is the browser Blink is made for and developed alongside.
Pro Completely Open Source
Both Chromium and and its rendering engine Blink are licensed under the BSD-license which includes no copyleft unlike the GNU or Mozilla Licenses.
Pro Access to Chrome's extensions
Chromium can access the Chrome Web Store and all the extensions hosted there can be installed and used on Chromium.
Pro Supports all of Google Chrome features
As Chrome is based on Chromium they overlap in supported features. Chromium syncs between devices, automatically updates, has great built-in developer tools, installs extensions without a restart, includes a combined text bar for entering URLs and searching and has excellent HTML5 compatibility just like Chrome.
Pro Bare
It does not have any extensions preinstalled and focuses to be a web browser.
Pro BSD license
You can do almost anything with the code.
Pro Gets constant updates
While the Chromium-based browser haev to adapt their code to the update before release, original Chromuim doesn't need it so it gets updated more constantly and frequently.
Pro Chromium sets the standard for Web Browsing
Since Google Chrome is the most used web browser, and that browser along with many others is based on Chromium, Chromium sets the standards for the internet and for security, and Firefox will always be years behind.
Pro Backed by Google
Chromium was first released as a large portion of Chrome's source code as an open source project by Google in september 2008. The idea was to encourage developers to review the underlying code and to contribute in making Chrome cross platform and port it to Mac and Linux as well.
Nowadays Chromium is a large project with a huge community that's standing behind it but still Google continues to take an extremely active role in Chromium development. This ensures the longevity and constant development and improvement of the browser.
Pro Does not come with Google
Unlike Chrome it does come wihout any Google account requirement.
Pro Low on resources
Pro Reloads on changes instantly
Pro Outline, properties and thumbnail panes
Pro Open multiple pdfs in tabs
qpdfview is a tabbed document viewer.
Pro Allows for some scripting
Opens files in named instances, open files on designated page.
Calling of userscripts on a document is thus far not possible.
Pro Fast search in all opened files
Pro Dark mode
However only inverted colors.
Pro Scale, rotate and fit
Pro Supports TOC-sidebar
Pro Switch tabs with keyboard shortcuts
Pro Continuous and multiple-page layouts
Pro Add highlights and text annotations
Pro DjVu support
Pro Fullscreen and presentation views
Pro PostScript support
Pro Custom background colors
Pro Multiplatform
It is available on any major computer OS.
Pro Deactivation of GUI elements
e.g.:
toggleMenuBar
toggleToolBars
Pro Supports thumbnail preview
Pro Input forms are editable
Cons
Con Lacks privacy options
Con High RAM usage
Due the sandboxing, Chromium also eats a lot of RAM , which can be a problem for machines with smaller RAM.
Con No official builds
There are no official builds available so you have to rely on a third party distributor
Con Not possible to disable WebRTC
Con Fat, slow, and another piece of google spyware
Con Lacks support for certain common media formats
As Chromium avoids bundling any proprietary software, media that requires proprietary codecs or formats such as AAC, H.264, MP3 and Flash will not play by default on Chromium.
Con Can be dangerous / only available as Source
There are plenty of unofficial Chromium distributors and every one of them can disable specific features (like sandboxing) for their build, so you will never know what you get.
Con Under BSD License
Con Deadly slow on complex pdf files
Con File information missing page size
Con No multiple mapping of commands
For example:
moveDown=Down
moveLeft=Shift+Left
moveRight=Shift+Right
moveUp=Up
Having two key mappings to execute the moveUp command doesn't seem to be possible.
Con Configuration intended via GUI
There is no explicit documentation of configuration parameters used in qpdfview.conf and shortcuts.conf (those are the most important ones). However the files are editable conveniently, which is of value.
