Chromium builds for Mac OS X

Solution 1:

The Chromium Project¹ does not seem to provide compiled builds for the OS X or Windows platform. If you run Ubuntu, you can use the Software Center to install Chromium just like you would with the Mac App Store.

Therefore, under OS X you would have to download the source code and build the application yourself which requires the use of the free Development Software Xcode².

You can follow the official Mac build instructions to help you get started:

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs/mac_build_instructions.md

Ewh! I don't want to go through all this trouble...

The Free OpenSource Mac User Group hosts a site that has the latest³ compiled build. According to their website:

...the download is compiled following the official Mac Build Instructions (link above).
...they integrated the Sparkle⁴ update framework to offer a simple update procedure since Chromium does not have the auto-update feature of Google Chrome.

Their download is a simple .dmg which you install via drag-and-drop, just like Chrome.

While they do provide a MD5 hash, the Chromium Project does not provide MD5 hashes of the compiled builds. So you have to trust this website's integrity when using their downloads.

Other than no auto-update integration, Chromium has some more differences from Google Chrome which you can read in the following Wikipedia article on Chromium (web browser).

Solution 2:

Currently recommended method (05-2017):

Install HomeBrew
brew tap domt4/chromium
brew cask install mac-chromium
brew tap buo/cask-upgrade (click here for cask-upgrade info/source)

To upgrade Chromium, run:

brew cu

brew cu -y -a

This was the original posted answer:

Install HomeBrew
~~Install HomeBrew Casks: brew install caskroom/cask/brew-cask~~ <- this is now obsolete
Install Chromium: brew cask install chromium

Or, an alternative

is this method which uses this script, and has a more up to date version as the one above (and also verifies the Chromium checksum), and provides updates:

Install HomeBrew
brew tap domt4/chromium
brew install domt4/chromium/chromium
brew linkapps chromium

updating is as simple as:

brew update; brew upgrade

If you want to automatically upgrade daily in the background you can use this (note that this also upgrades your other HomeBrew packages if you have any):

brew tap domt4/autoupdate
brew autoupdate --start --upgrade

Solution 3:

Stable build from FreeSMUG (Free Software Mac User Group are here: http://www.freesmug.org/chromium

Solution 4:

The proper way is kind of convoluted and unnecessarily difficult. However, in my recent struggles to find the answer myself, I want to let everyone here know what I did to arrive where I am at now.

Go to https://omahaproxy.appspot.com/ to find what "branch_base_position" number you will need to find for retrieving the Chromium.application zip file.
Find you "os" (mac) and "channel": stable, beta, dev, or canary.
Once you have identified which oc and channel that you want to use/download, copy the "branch_base_position" number and head here: https://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-snapshots/index.html?prefix=Mac/
At the time of this post: May 17, 2019 and 2:05pm EST, the latest stable version for mac was 74.0.3729.157 with a "branch_base_position" number of 638880, so the link to the latest stable built mac application is: https://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-snapshots/index.html?prefix=Mac/638880/
Additionally, the latest dev build was 76.0.3788.1 with a "branch_base_position" number of 657589, so the link to the latest dev built mac application is: https://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-snapshots/index.html?prefix=Mac/657589/
The latest revision of beta was 75.0.3770.38, but I could not find a built package for it so I will not provide it here.
Once you have downloaded and unzipped the version you have chosen, simply drag the Chromium.app from wherever you unpacked it to, into the Applications folder.

Note

In steps 4 and 5, the file that you will need to download is chrome-mac.zip

Note 2

From what I can tell, the install requirements for mac are OS X Yosemite 10.10 or later taken from https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7100626?hl=en

Note 3

All this information was found from going to https://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/download-chromium in the section titled "Downloading old builds of Chrome / Chromium"

Edit 12/14/2021

This method is still valid, but I personally use the Woolyss builds.