How does Google attempt to stop you from using Chromium?

The variety of strategies Google uses to block the use of Chromium but encourage contribution to it is interesting, if more than a bit underhanded. The first step to using Chromium is downloading it and they made sure it wasn’t inviting, at least if you are trying to install it on Windows or macOS. (The install on Linux is much more straight forward, I suspect that is because they know most developers including their own staff would be using Linux to contribute.)

When you first attempt to download Chromium this is what you are met with at chromium.org. Notice the only text that says “Download” redirects to Chrome. So, that is not what you want; you click Chromium. That brings you to this:

Can you figure out how to download Chromium from here? Well, you are wrong, it is actually by clicking “Getting Involved.” From there you get brought to yet another confusing page:

This one is pretty obvious but on a page full of links it can be easy to miss. After clicking “latest trunk build of Chromium” we are finally brought to the download page:

Okay, we are finally getting somewhere. We follow the “Easy Point and Click” download link where we are warned about instability(although I have had no such issues). Then, we finally get an installer, nope a Zip file. Not a big deal we can just extract it; open it; and finally run “chrome.exe.” Let’s do some browsing.