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I have chromium-browser installed from the default Ubuntu repositories. When interrogated, it claims to be version 32.

# chromium-browser --version
Chromium 32.0.1700.107 Ubuntu 13.10

Is this Chromium up to date?

It may seem obvious that software installed from the repositories will remain up-to-date as long as the system is updated. However, chromium-browser comes from the Universe repository which is maintained by the community. 

# apt-cache show chromium-browser
Package: chromium-browser
Priority: optional
Section: universe/web
Installed-Size: 142499
Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com>
Original-Maintainer: Micah Gersten <micahg@ubuntu.com>, Fabien Tassin <fta@ubuntu.com>
Architecture: amd64
Version: 32.0.1700.107-0ubuntu0.13.10.1~20140204.972.1

Is Chromium actually maintained? The Chromium project doesn't have any stable versions but Google's Chrome seems to be on version 33 already.

Damn Terminal
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It is not up to date.

You can see the Chromium release calendar here. At the moment Chromium 34 is the current stable release. Also see the Chromium blog.

As Thomas W. pointed out, in Ubuntu 13.10 the "Universe" repository is fixed. That means they won't have the newer Chromium in 13.10 ever, unless it's backported or put in a PPA.

Unfortunately, the PPAs of the Chromium Builds team at Launchpad, which are supposed to offer a variety of stable and beta Chromium builds, seem not to have been maintained for a while.

This means you will have to wait for Ubuntu 14.04.

If you do not want to wait, you can download and install Chromium Beta manually (beware, it will not be maintained by apt). That will be Chromium 35 Beta, then. Unfortunately the Chromium projects don't provide any stable builds for Linux, so if you want the current Chromium 34 you will have to compile it yourself. You will first have to checkout the source using git, then switch to the 34 branch. This is slightly involved, so if you want to do that best follow the instructions that I linked to and if you have any particular questions, post them here. :)

Malte Skoruppa
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  • Wrong. In 13.10, the "Universe" repository is fixed just like Main is. They won't have the newer Chromium in 13.10 ever, unless it's backported or put in a PPA. If they want newer Chromium, they'll have to wait for 14.04 to be released. – Thomas Ward Feb 28 '14 at 23:36
  • @ThomasW. Thank you for the pointer. You are right of course, and I edited my post accordingly. – Malte Skoruppa Feb 28 '14 at 23:42
  • I probably should have asked right away, but what are the security implications? Security fixes are not backported either? Am I using a potentially vulnerable browser? – Damn Terminal Mar 01 '14 at 00:05
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    Security fixes are backported, Chromium is just not updated to a new version. This avoids regression bugs on the one hand and fixes security vulnerabilities on the other. – Malte Skoruppa Mar 01 '14 at 00:06
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    @DamnTerminal Security fixes in "Universe" aren't automatic. Those're user-contributed/maintained patches through a process that is similar to the Stable Release Updates process. They're "backported" and put in the RELEASE_NAME-security repository, but they won't bump your version up to latest. – Thomas Ward Mar 01 '14 at 00:07
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    @ThomasW can you please explain why LibreOffice which is also in Universe get updates within a release? – DK Bose Mar 01 '14 at 02:17
  • @DKBose maybe you should read through this and this which cover the SRU process and identifies why some programs are allowed to have updates to their versions beyond just bug fixes. – Thomas Ward Mar 01 '14 at 14:45
  • @ThomasW. This is quite interesting. Looking at your second link, I see that chromium-browser is actually a standing exception to the SRU rule. Does this mean I was, in the end, correct when I speculated that a newer Chromium would be made available sooner or later in the Universe repos? – Malte Skoruppa Mar 01 '14 at 18:02
  • @MalteSkoruppa probably better to ask the chromium-browser maintainers rather than I. I don't know what the MRE covers, it may only cover tiny microreleases (like x.x.2 to x.x.3) to fix security bugs and such, but... the chromium-browser people, or the Lubuntu team, would know the specifics. – Thomas Ward Mar 01 '14 at 18:09
  • Currently, Chromium 33 is the latest chromium version, not 34. M34 is on the beta channel, and M35 is on the dev channel. As for maintenance, there is a maintainer who tries to keep up-to-date versions. At the moment, I believe he's focusing on resolving bugs and keeping an eye on M35 (Aura). As for getting newer versions, there are precompiled builds here, and I have (two PPAs)[https://launchpad.net/~saiarcot895] that track the beta and dev channels. – saiarcot895 Mar 14 '14 at 11:55