(*) Caveat: It must be a small challenge involving a relatively simple task. I don't have a lot of time to waste on this.
Nice caveat. Let me rephrase that another way for you: it is difficult to implement complicated functionality in C. Indeed, this is one reason to use higher level languages. You can achieve more in less time.
Well, Chromium doesn't even compile and run on linux yet beyond some unit-tests passing (AFAIK). By the time it's actually a viable browser in linux, these issues will have worked themselves out. My point was not that every single user should be able to fix this for themselves but that this is a very solvable problem, and one that will be receiving a lot of attention in the coming months.
Google has done us all a great service by releasing the code-- many parts of Chromium will soon find use in other projects. Google-url, for example, looks pretty handy. It looks like Chromium uses a modular design with a lot libraries (both from google and third-party), so even if it is, in toto, an enormous codebase, it shouldn't be too hard to isolate any undesirable functionality. In conclusion: the sky is not falling.
Documentation is like sex: when it is good, it is very, very good; and when it is bad, it is better than nothing. -- Dick Brandon