Mozilla is not a club of like-minded hackers that try to keep the web livable anymore. They're a large company now with corporate salaries and expensive furniture and a prime real estate office that values advertisers over users. Firefox is their money maker.
Chromium is a Free Software version derived from a proprietary browser. The people who made that happen must have had an idealistic motivation, or otherwise it wouldn't exist.
Both browsers are libre license-wise, which is a good thing, but in my opinion Chromium is less likely to be used as a marketing stick against users, since the marketing stick version of Chromium already exist. As such using the Chromium browser is preferable for me, since the intentions behind it are likely to be more in line with a free Internet in spite of its proprietary origin.
So even though current Chrome might be based on Chromium, Chromium was initially derived from Chrome.
That means somewhere down the line someone at Google must have suggested making a free version, probably out of enthusiasm for open source, and even though it buys Google little, the project was okay'ed.
I have no illusions about Chromium being independent, but as things are, Chromium development, in my opinion, is less commercially driven than Firefox development in spite of being a Google-driven project, allowing it to better serve its users with regards to freedom and the open web.
The main danger of Google's involvement is if Chromium would somehow outpace Chrome deployments, and them pulling the plug, but that's still very far away. And even then, due to its libre license, everything is far from lost.
Mozilla is not a club of like-minded hackers that try to keep the web livable anymore. They're a large company now with corporate salaries and expensive furniture and a prime real estate office that values advertisers over users. Firefox is their money maker.
Chromium is a Free Software version derived from a proprietary browser. The people who made that happen must have had an idealistic motivation, or otherwise it wouldn't exist.
Both browsers are libre license-wise, which is a good thing, but in my opinion Chromium is less likely to be used as a marketing stick against users, since the marketing stick version of Chromium already exist. As such using the Chromium browser is preferable for me, since the intentions behind it are likely to be more in line with a free Internet in spite of its proprietary origin.