The folks at Google made it sound as if, once you had the source code, building Chromium was as easy as loading up the solution file in Visual Studio and pressing F7 -- so that's what I did. And you know what? They were right! Fifteen minutes and 51 compiler warnings later, I had my chrome.exe. (For reference, this was on a 2.4GHz Intel Q6600 quad-core workstation running Vista Ultimate, with 4GB of RAM and ample hard drive space.)

Launching the browser brought no real surprises. As the name suggests, Chromium is a rawer, less polished version of Chrome. The UI is mostly identical, with only a few very minor visual differences. All of the same options are available in the pull-down menus on the right. Sites render the same, including Flash sites. The most readily evident difference is the logo, which sheds the Google colors in favor of a subdued blue design.

Where it comes to overall ease of use, however, Google has put in a little extra effort to differentiate Chrome from Chromium. Chrome offered to import my Firefox 3 settings automatically on first launch, and the process went without a hitch. I had to do it manually with Chromium, and when I tried, it gagged on my search engine settings and aborted the process. I managed to bring in my bookmarks by importing them separately; but while Chrome organized them just like my Firefox setup, Chromium hid them away in a subfolder.

These minor quibbles aside, however, my initial impression of Chromium is that it is a full-featured, usable browser. Better still, its code is straightforward and well organized, which should make it appealing to would-be browser developers who have shied away from the more daunting Mozilla codebase. I'm looking forward to seeing how it develops as Chrome moves toward its first stable release and beyond.