When comparing Chromium vs (Spac)emacs with pdf-tools, the Slant community recommends Chromium for most people. In the question“What are the best PDF viewers for UNIX-like systems?” Chromium is ranked 12th while (Spac)emacs with pdf-tools is ranked 15th. The most important reason people chose Chromium is:
Chrome and Chromium are available on almost every device nowadays
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion 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 Extensible, customizable and scriptable
Being a Emacs plugin you can use elisp to customize, script and extend pdf-tools.
Pro Can treat multiple PDF's as one big PDF
Pro Nice search using Occur
Occur creates a list all lines matching a regexp or string in one or more pdfs and allows easy jumping between them. Really helpful when searching long documents like datasheets.
Pro Synctex support
Pro Easy installation
Although installing requires little more work than stand-alone readers, pdf-tools is very easily installed via Emacs 'list-packages' or even easier as a layer in Spacemacs
Pro Convenient default keyboard shortcuts
Uses emacs or vim-style navigation (via spacemacs/evil. Shortcut overview via transient state "SPC m .")
Pro Automatically exported notes
Notes can be exported automatically to and backlinked from an external org notes file using the org-noter or interleave package.
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 Only for power users
Handy only for people that want good notes/annotation management. Otherwise using any other pdf-reader is recommended.
Con Too cumbersome for quick reading or annotating
Although setting up pdf-tools is not too much work. For quick reading using some default pdf-viewer like evince/okular/zathura is recommended. Also, except for the auto-export feature (with org-noter/interleave package), other editors like e.g. pdf-XChange Editor (via wine), Okular or mupdf have even more powerful annotation features.