Exploring Chromium for Android

andrewWright Blocked Unblock Follow Following Dec 7, 2016

No one has publicly explained Chromium for Android’s Dino Game Easter Egg, so I thought I’d go ahead and tell the Internet before anyone else does.

If you don’t have Chromium for Android, it’s available in the form of latest builds you can manually download and install from https://download-chromium.appspot.com , or via my open source app getChromium on Google Play. You can also just cut out the middleman and check out and build your own Chromium for Android, something that I highly recommend.

While there’s no shortage of amazing things to be experienced within the awesome app that is Chromium’s latest build, one of my personal favorites is dino. When you’re running Chromium and you want to experience the addictive simplicity of dino you can simply navigate to chrome://dino and enjoy a few games. You don’t have to actually be disconnected or in airplane mode, this internal URL works the same either way.

Chromium for Android is full of exciting internal URLs that unlock advanced features and customization, often long before they ever become available(and not all of them do)on Google’s mainstream Chrome browser. Please read the lengthy WARNING and then go ahead and proceed if you dare.

For instance, if you’re reading this on Chromium for Android now, just

Enter chrome://flags into the omnibox address bar and hit search. In the options select ‘Find in page’ and search for:

‘Chrome Home Android’.

Now select ‘Enable’ from the available options Finally, press the blue button at the bottom of your screen that says “RELAUNCH NOW”.

Wait for it…

Notice anything different?

Chrome Home Android ENABLED.

Now, just in case you notice things getting buggy after enabling this experimental feature and you want to change it back:

Navigate to chrome://flags and you’ll have at least two options.

A. Disable Chrome Home Android

This undoes what you just did, leaving enact any of the other experimental features that you have enabled or disabled. In the options select ‘Find in page’ and search for ‘Chrome Home Android’. Now select ‘Disable’ from the available options and press the blue button at the bottom of your screen that says “RELAUNCH NOW”. If Chromium fails to restart on its own, simply manually kill the app and restart.

B. Reset all to default

This is the nuclear option, putting everything back to default, and is generally only a last resort. Directly underneath the large WARNING at the top of the page on the far right of the page, directly across from ‘Experiments’ is a ‘Reset all to default’ button. If Chromium fails to restart on its own, simply manually kill the app and restart.

Chromium for Android doesn’t automatically update as does Google Chrome, so to keep up with the latest changes means installing a newer latest build to update the app. The Chromium team releases builds constantly, so you can update as often as once a day or more, or as seldom as every week or month.

-Stay tuned, there’s more coming in Part 02 of this series.