Chroomium Browser

If you find Chroomium Browser on your computer, it means that you may have not been using your legitimate Google Chrome browser for a while even if you thought so. This application disguises itself as a Chromium engine-based browser that keeps all the resemblance to Chrome itself. The only difference could be the double “o” in its name, which again is rather misleading; and for a reason. Since we have found this application questionable as it might cause potential virtual security issues indirectly, we have labeled it as a potentially unwanted program, or PUP. Many users do not pay attention to such programs because they think that these are totally harmless and innocent tools. Of course, we cannot claim that this PUP is a dangerous threat to your computer, but you should know about the risks you take by leaving it on your computer. We believe that you would be safer in your virtual world if this PUP were not part of it. Since it is a bit complicated to remove Chroomium Browser from your operating system because it has no uninstaller to run in Control Panel, we recommend that you read our full article to understand more about this potential threat and how you can manually clean it from your PC.

We have found an official-looking domain, chroomium.com, but this one seems to be down for some time, or it is possible that it has not yet been up and running. Therefore, we cannot be 100% sure that this is the promotional website for this PUP, even though it seems quite obvious. What we can confirm, though, is that we cannot find any other websites where this application is promoted or could be downloaded as a standalone installer. And that is quite a questionable trait when it comes to reliability. Can you imagine that you cannot find a promotional website for Google Chrome, for instance? But you would still find it on your computer. Would you not wonder how it has got there? Would you not question its reliability?

Computer users report that this PUP seems to just show up on their computers. Of course, this is not really so, but many users do not realize that they initiate these downloads or installations themselves. It is true that certain installers try to be misleading so that users install all the content by default, but if you are careful enough, you can still opt out of letting a bunch of useless PUPs and even malware infections onto your computer. If you do not remember installing this PUP, it is quite likely that you have downloaded and installed a freeware bundle lately. This is how most users infect their computers actually. It is enough to click on the wrong content on a questionable or suspicious file-sharing website and you can easily get “richer” with a number of PUPs and malware threats as well.

If you want to download free software safely, you should be very careful not to end up on such pages. Landing on an unfamiliar freeware site, for example, may fool you into clicking on unsafe third-party content. On some fake websites it does not even matter where you click, the result will be the same: You will download a malicious bundle. Try to always use reputable and official websites for downloading programs. This could help you avoid such bundles. However, if you think that you may have installed such a package, you should delete Chroomium Browser and scan your system with a reliable malware scanner to identify all other threat sources. Remember that your PC will not be fully safe until you take care of all the infections present.

We have noticed that this PUP is very similar to other Chromium based browsers, including Ghokswa, which all have the same goal, i.e., to look identical or misleadingly similar to Google Chrome so that users do not even notice they are using a PUP instead of the original. Once this PUP crawls onto your computer, it creates a number of registry keys and folders to operate through. It also modifies your Google Chrome browser shortcut Target line to make sure that Chroomium Browser will launch whenever you want to use Chrome. We have discovered that it is also possible that this PUP drops a few malware infections, such as browser hijackers (yessearches.com). That is definitely not great news with regard to your system security as hijackers can expose you to unsafe web content and thus pose a threat to your computer. All in all, we think you are better off removing Chroomium Browser from your computer if you do not want to risk being exploited by cyber criminals in any way.

Since this PUP does not have a working uninstaller, which again is rather suspicious, it could be a bit complicated for inexperienced computer users to eliminate Chroomium Browser. As a matter of fact, we only recommend the manual removal in this case for experienced users because changing the Windows Registry is a risky task. Removing or modifying the wrong keys could lead to irrevocable damage to your operating system. Please use our instructions below very carefully to completely clean this application from your computer. If you would like to protect your PC from similar infections and more serious threats as well, we suggest that you use a trustworthy and reputable antimalware application.

How to remove Chroomium Browser from Windows

1. Press Win+R and type in regedit to launch Windows Registry editor.
2. Locate and delete the following registry keys:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\chroomium
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\chroomium (64-bit only)
   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\chroomiumHTM
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Clients\StartMenuInternet\chroomium
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Clients\StartMenuInternet\chroomium (64-bit only)
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet002\services\WSModules
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\services\WSModules
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\WSModules
3. Locate the following registry keys and delete the value name “progid” ONLY if its value data is "chroomiumHTM":
   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.htm\UserChoice
   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.html\UserChoice
   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.shtml\UserChoice
   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.xht\UserChoice
   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.xhtml\UserChoice
4. Close the editor.
5. Press Win+E to launch Windows File Explorer.
6. Locate and delete these directories: %PROGRAMFILES(x86)%\chroomium Browser (64-bit only) and %PROGRAMFILES%\chroomium Browser.
7. Copy and paste the following paths into the address bar and delete the given task names:
   %WINDIR%\Tasks task name: "chroomiumBrowserUpdateCore"
   %WINDIR%\System32\Tasks task name: "chroomiumBrowserUpdateUA"
   %WINDIR%\System32\Tasks task name: "chroomiumCheckTask"
8. Restart your computer.