Advanced Chrome

Built as a fork from Google Chrome, Advanced Chrome is a custom build that aims to bring new features and fix issues that remain unresolved by Chromium. It's mostly geared toward developers. Because the software project is free and open source, anyone can bring their own contributions to it to make Chrome bigger and better.

We're going to describe some features that Advanced Chrome has and Chromium doesn't. For example, the menu responsible with customizing and controlling the web browser of Advanced Chrome has something called "Distiller", which strips the current page of extra content and graphics, creating the type of page that's easy to read on mobile devices (continuous scrolling with article headlines and descriptions). It's also available in the right-click menu as "Read mode".  Meanwhile, the "More tools" submenu has an option for creating desktop shortcuts to the current page.

If you check the "Ask where to save each file before downloading" option in Chromium, you receive a popup window on each action. Advanced Chrome, on the other hand, asks you this question where the status bar normally lies while also giving you the possibility to open the file (besides saving or discarding it).

This is a huge bonus if you frequently download files in Chrome since the popup window interrupts whatever it is you are doing at that point (maybe writing a message while waiting for a file download signal to be intercepted by Chrome). This approach is used by Advanced Chrome even when the "Ask where to save each file before downloading" is disabled, in order to prevent the saving directory from getting filled with numerous files.

During file downloads, Advanced Chrome shows more information when comparing it to Chromium, namely the speed rate. In Chromium, you can only see this when switching to the "Downloads" tab.

What's more, the forked version of Chrome fixes some issues that occur in Chromium. For instance, it keeps NPAPI support that was removed by Chrome, maintains the password autocomplete option functional even on SSL warnings, and gets rid of DirectWrite and Skia, which make text blurry and difficult to read. It also comes with built-in Flash Player and JavaScript blocking via the right-click menu, among other features.

All aspects considered, it's a good idea to keep Advanced Chrome on your computer even if you're a Chrome fan because it unlocks some cool features that Google's browser doesn't have.