Puppeteer confusion around Chrome for Testing vs Chromium

Question

At this link, https://pptr.dev/chromium-support, the page title says it's the Chromium versions that are supported for each Puppeteer release.

But, the latest releases all say "Chrome for Testing" and not "Chromium". Why is that?

And also, from reading about Chrome for Testing, it looks like Chrome for Testing is a version of Chrome, not Chromium. So does this mean that Puppeteer now targets Chrome specifically and not Chromium? Should I only be running Chrome for Testing from the CLI to have puppeteer connect to a running instance instead of Chromium entirely?

Answer 1

Chrome for Testing is a new flavor of Chrome specifically for testing/automation. The documentation page indicates at what point Puppeteer switched from bundling Chromium builds to Chrome for Testing. Correspondingly, newer Puppeteer versions download Chrome for Testing by default. You can still use Chromium (which you need to install yourself) but Puppeteer is not explicitly tested for compatibility with Chromium builds.

P.S. there is an issue to make this documentation page more clear.