I've always used source-based packages, but chromium was the one I simply dropped in favour of Firefox.
On a 16c32t / 64G machine, compiling Firefox takes ~1h with LTO and PGO, while Chromium already took 5+h in 2019 without PGO. Then they removed jumbo-build because there were some issues and kept adding code and toolchain deps (jumbo-build is a build step that merges a few hundred source files before compiling to do the header processing once, shrinking the build from 5h+ to ~1-2h). Last time I checked the build had 70k+ build steps, with the final link step easily taking 10m+ with LLD. Answering some other comments: ccache doesn't help, because every version will have some minor header changes somewhere, so basically the entire cache gets invalidated even within the same major (e.g. 151.44.22.11 to 151.44.23.28).
I've always used source-based packages, but chromium was the one I simply dropped in favour of Firefox.
On a 16c32t / 64G machine, compiling Firefox takes ~1h with LTO and PGO, while Chromium already took 5+h in 2019 without PGO. Then they removed jumbo-build because there were some issues and kept adding code and toolchain deps (jumbo-build is a build step that merges a few hundred source files before compiling to do the header processing once, shrinking the build from 5h+ to ~1-2h). Last time I checked the build had 70k+ build steps, with the final link step easily taking 10m+ with LLD. Answering some other comments: ccache doesn't help, because every version will have some minor header changes somewhere, so basically the entire cache gets invalidated even within the same major (e.g. 151.44.22.11 to 151.44.23.28).