GoKawiil
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Android Authority published a list of nine Chromium-based browsers for Android that strip out Google's integrations, including Bare Browser, Brave, Vivaldi and others. The piece highlights options chosen for regular updates, distinct features, longevity, and ease of use, noting most require manual installation outside typical app stores.
A hobbyist project called R2D2 replaces a webOS smart TV's stock interface with a locally hosted home screen, a private sandboxed browser, and a push-to-talk voice assistant. The system works by pairing the TV with a separate Linux compute host that renders Chromium and runs speech-recognition models, streaming output back to the TV over the local network. The creator has published the source code along with detailed warnings that the setup requires rooting the TV and patching vendor system services on one specific firmware build.
Researchers at Have I Been Squatted demonstrated that a domain written as 'аррӏө.com,' using Cyrillic lookalike characters, can evade Chromium's safeguards against deceptive Unicode domains even though it visually mimics apple.com. Chromium normally flags mixed-script domains by converting them to Punycode, and blocks domains built entirely from its list of 29 known Cyrillic lookalike characters, but this specific character combination slips through both checks.
Gentoo Linux's Chromium package maintainers have decided to stop maintaining the browser, citing the difficulty of building and packaging it alongside persistent user complaints. Chromium's complex build system, frequent release cadence, and bundled dependencies have made it unusually burdensome for Gentoo's source-based packaging approach, which relies on ebuild files and the Portage tool.
At FOSSY 2026, Chromium developer Sharon Yang described her move from a six-year engineering role at Google to her current position at Igalia, an employee-owned cooperative. Her talk, titled 'From Corporate to Co-op,' compared how the two organizations approach Chromium development despite both contributing to the same open-source codebase and working with overlapping teams.
Mozilla has introduced Firefox Enterprise, a version of its browser aimed at companies and institutions that need compliance, governance and security controls hosted on their own infrastructure. The offering includes a self-hosted management console allowing administrators to set policies on data access, authentication and AI tool usage, and is being marketed specifically to European organizations. Mozilla says Firefox already has about 200 million monthly users and thousands of organizations deploying custom policies, and this new tier adds paid tools on top of the free, open-source browser.
An open-source project called Bez proposes generating a web rendering engine automatically, using web specifications as source material and checking output against Chromium, Firefox and WebKit plus the WPT test suite. The system reportedly lets a model produce candidate implementations, verifies them against the three browsers' rendered layouts, and commits matching code as standard Rust. Bez can also produce 'tree-shaken' builds containing only the web features a given site or app actually uses.
American start-ups including Unigrid are developing sodium-ion batteries aiming for fully US-sourced supply chains, unlike lithium-ion batteries where China dominates materials and manufacturing. Unigrid's founder Tan says the company currently sources its sodium-ion cells from China but could shift to US suppliers later. Scientists have raised concerns that chromium-3 used in Unigrid's cathode could form toxic chromium-6 under certain conditions, though Tan and one outside researcher say the risk is manageable and the battery has passed safety certification.
Discord confirmed on X that an experimental Game Mode, spotted in leaked screenshots over the weekend, will begin rolling out to users next week. The toggle is designed to reduce Discord's CPU and GPU usage while a game is running, and the company says it plans to add more resource-saving features over time.
A researcher demonstrated that an unsanitized Twitch chat overlay running as an OBS Browser Source could let a viewer inject JavaScript into OBS's embedded Chromium browser. Because that Chromium build shipped in OBS 32.2.2 ran without its sandbox and included a V8 engine still vulnerable to the already-exploited CVE-2024-7971, the researcher was able to turn a single chat message into full code execution on the streamer's machine, using default OBS settings.
Makepad creator Rik Arends built a 3D navigable tool that renders up to 2.5 million lines of source code at over 120 frames per second, initially requiring 21GB of RAM before optimizations to indexing and streaming compression brought usage down to 3.5GB. He also tested loading Chromium's 51-million-line codebase, which took about 60 seconds.
Google engineers published the first post in a series explaining Oilpan, the garbage collector Chromium adopted to manage C++ memory tangled with JavaScript objects in the DOM. The post covers Oilpan's mark-sweep design, its cross-component tracing link to V8, and concurrent object reclamation in its sweeper. The team also revealed plans to move Oilpan from Blink into V8 itself as a standalone garbage collection library.