[gracefullyparanoid]

Chromium is an open source browser. Google skins it, adds their surveillance and spyware and calls it “Chrome”. There are other versions of chromium including MS Edge, Vivaldi, Brave, Opera. Chromium is basically Chrome without the google add ons. It doesn’t sent all your personal information back to the google collective to control you.

[dayglored]

One other important distinction. Chromium -- the browser "foundation" on which all those other browsers are built -- is completely public open source, and there are thousands of professional programmers constantly looking at it to find bugs, hidden stuff, etc. That keeps it very clean, spyware-wise.

Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and the others add their own "special sauce", which CAN contain spyware, because the additional code is often not open source.