Chromium vs Shebe

Chromium is a free, open-source browser project and codebase for developers who build, study, and contribute to it. The project publishes source code, design and architecture documents, testing information, and contribution guidance. It develops the V8 JavaScript engine and Blink rendering engine. Its documented security approach includes sandboxing, Safe Browsing, defense in depth, and safe defaults, with a security team reviewing architecture and helping address bugs. Chromium source code is released under a permissive BSD license, and Google uses the project as the basis for Google Chrome. Build instructions cover Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android; download archives list Mac, Windows, Linux, and ChromiumOS. Builds are supplied on a best-effort basis from arbitrary revisions, may differ from user-facing Chrome releases, do not auto-update, and do not include symbols. Site Isolation can increase memory use and has stated Android limitations.

Shebe is a local code-search tool that uses BM25 full-text search across code repositories. It ranks results and supports phrase searches, Boolean queries, and literal matching. Fourteen MCP tools serve coding agents with functions including search, repository indexing, file reading, and reference finding. Shebe runs without embeddings, a GPU, or a cloud service, but repositories must be cloned locally before indexing; remote repository URLs are not supported. Its text-based search does not provide semantic similarity, so related words such as “login” and “authenticate” may not match. Prebuilt binaries are listed for Linux x86_64 and macOS on Apple Silicon and Intel; Linux ARM64 is planned. Windows users need to build it from source. The installation guide covers MCP setup and Zed configuration and points to the organization for VS Code and other editor extensions. Shebe is free and licensed under Apache-2.0. The README reports 2 ms query latency and indexing rates from 1,928 to 11,210 files per second in its listed benchmarks.