It requires additional changes for every single project to change the entire stack from top to bottom to use google-chrome instead and/or to take the delay in CI and manually install the missing package. When developer tooling is written for Linux, it generally binds against chromium. Instead, I'm raising it as an issue of interoperability. The reasons for why people choose one over the other don't really matter since this is not an issue of preference, nor an issue of how easy it is to switch for an individual GitHub project. Perhaps because google-chrome isn't permitted the default package manager, or for privacy reasons around usage at home, or other reasons. I think you'll find that in general when people install a chromium browser on Linux, especialy on Ubuntu, they install Chromium and not Google Chrome. Swapping one for the other with a symlink would inevitably lead to customer service reports about command flags not working or having incompatible defaults. And conversely there is notable distractions in the network stack in Google Chrome (by default) that makes network and performance testing more difficult, compared to the less noisy defaults in Chromium. Plus changes in browser features, such as DRM and media codec support that Google supports but Chromium does not. There are also different command-line flags supported by these, and with different default values. However, they are definitely different browsers with significant differences in how they're compiled, which Web APIs are enabled, and when, and the proprietary capabilities, restrictions, and tracking the vendors add to the binaries. If one is developing a new open source project, I'm sure if it can work on one it'll probably work on the other, and the same for developer tooling. The differences between Chromium and its derivatives (Google Chrome, Opera, Brave, Microsoft Edge, etc.) aren't huge in terms of Web APIs. That seems fine to keep for back compat and as convenience for those who specifically prefer Google on Linux for some reason. Yeah, that's no reason to remove the non-standard google-chrome install.

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