Chromium fork for Windows named after radioactive element No. 90; Windows builds of https://github.com/Alex313031/Thorium
BSD-3-CLAUSE License
Bot releases are visible (Hide)
Published by Alex313031 about 1 month ago
//components/extensions/
source code level)chrome://flags#custom-tab-width
: This lets you set the default tab width to 60px, 120px, 240px (the Chromium default), 300px, or 400px. I decided against adding a text box where you could type a specific width, because if you accidentally set it too small or too large, the browser becomes unusable. These pre-defined widths should cover most use cases. NOTE: Since the code I added uses pixel values (px) instead of DPI values (dp), if you have Windows set to a large DPI level like 200%, you should account for that and set the custom width value to lower than what you are wanting.thorium_all
build target, that automagically builds everything to make an official release build + installer for the given platform. (Of interest only to developers or people wanting to build Thorium themselves).Those of you who tested the Linux beta 2 build, and were happy with the results, and lastly requested I make a Windows equivalent release will now be happy. Please close those feedback issues if you can, I am already swamped by issues in all of my repos. If I haven't responded I promise I'm not ignoring you!
These builds are AVX only, sorry.
And yes I know, I know, I'm already behind on Chromium versions, thus will probably skip M127 and start work on M128 this weekend.
Published by Alex313031 about 2 months ago
– So the new UI (goes by various names like Chrome Refresh, Chrome Refresh 2023, often shortened to Cr23 in documents and source code) that Google has made is completely fucked. I almost always bleep out cuss words here with **** but I want to emphasize its fucked-ness lol.)
➕ many, many more complaints and issues from me, Thorium users, and the community at large (just take a look at the Chromium bugs or Google Chrome Help threads and search for "2023" or "Cr23")
Thus, I am starting a UI redesign initiative tentatively called "Th24" (Which is also nice since the browser is named after radioactive element Thorium, one isotope of which happens to have a radiation half-life of 24.0 days lol).
This doesn't attempt to completely revert the Cr23 UI (they have since removed all the pre-Cr23 UI code, which covers hundreds of files. The amount of work to keep it reverted and maintained each release would be ridiculous). Instead, it attempts to come up with new code paths to create a UI that more closely matches the old, non-Cr23 UI, especially for specific problem areas like mentioned above. I'm not gonna touch colors or icons for example.
This is a beta build that is buggy but does solve alot of the above:
All of this is not the default!. You will have to go to chrome://flags and enable the new chrome://flags/#thorium-2024
flag.
Future work to be done on > WebUI mangling, omnibox icons, button radius, and the padding between extension icons (when you "pin" an extension to the top bar).
If you would like to integrate these fixes into your own Chromium build, I have decided that instead of adding files to the Thorium src tree, the changes are instead in a git ".patch" file that can be applied separately to vanilla Chromium (Kinda like the .patch files in the thorium-libjxl repo that serve the same purpose for JPEG-XL support). Just make sure the version of Chromium matches or is very close to the one Thorium is currently on. See > https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium/blob/main/other/thorium-2024-ui.patch
SSE4 builds only. You can use the .zip if you don't want to touch your main installation.
Published by Alex313031 2 months ago
M126
kAllowWindowDragUsingSystemDragDrop
was re-enabled at the source level. This should fix tab/window dragging issues on Wayland, but may cause other unforeseen bugs on Wayland. File bugs if appropriate. Can be disabled with the cmdline flag --disable-features=AllowWindowDragUsingSystemDragDrop
chrome://flags/#left-aligned-tab-search-button
flag I added.chrome://flags#revert-from-portable
can be used to prevent data loss when reverting a user profile from portable mode to normal mode (i.e. when turning off the disable-encryption and disable-machine-id flags). Can also be used when moving the user profile from one machine to another. Read the flag description for details.Two more things:
– I have created a new user survey for 2024. The more responses I get, the better, and it will be used to guide decisions about Thorium into Q4 of 2024. Take the 8 question quick survey here > https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/355TK88
– I am hosting an art/image contest! The winner's image will be displayed on the easter egg page, as well as the chrome://version page. It should be an art or clipart image. See details and requirements over here > https://thorium.rocks/contest
Published by Alex313031 5 months ago
M124
libffmpeg
library.chrome://flags#side-panel-journeys
chrome://flags#show-component-extension-options
. I did this because I was getting too many issues with people wondering what they are, why they couldn't be removed, and if they were a security concern. These extensions are built in to every Chromium browser. Disabling them would remove support for the Web Store, viewing PDFs, and integrating with Google Hangouts. I added a patch from UnGoogled Chromium a while back to un-hide them, but it has led to more confusion than it is worth. Since most people don't care, they are now hidden again, but the flag is for people who want to inspect or debug them, or just want the transparency of showing all extensions that are loaded in the browser.chrome://flags/#chrome-refresh-2023
and chrome://flags/#customize-chrome-side-panel
flags as mentioned in the M123 release, it still won't actually work unless you also pass the --disable-features=CustomizeChromeSidePanelNoChromeRefresh2023
flag. Since I didn't catch this until afterward, there is no GUI flag available on the chrome://flags page. You will need to specify it manually on the commandline, either from the terminal, or to make it permanent, by editing the shortcut (on Windows), or editing /usr/bin/thorium-browser (on Linux). Next release will fix this.--disable-thorium-dns-config
flag on the commandline, Thorium will use the default Chromium DNS configuration. You can make it permanent using the same steps as above. I will also make this a GUI flag in the next release.ftp://
URLs back in 2021. This has always annoyed me, because alot of ftp servers are still around, and alot of old software is only downloadable from ftp servers. In addition, tools like wget and curl wont download from them by default. This made it really convoluted to download files from an ftp website, usually making the user have to download a third party app. FTP means "File Transfer Protocol", and it was used heavily on the web for serving download directories to people (Microsoft used to host updates on an ftp site, for example). Learn more about it Here. It is enabled by default, but can also be disabled by the restored flag chrome://flags/#enable-ftp
. There are two minor bugs though. First, favicons don't work, so when you are on an ftp site, the tab will show the "dino" icon usually used when a site is not reachable. Second, directly clicking links doesn't work, and will instead land you on an "about:blank#blocked" page. To go to an ftp site, right click the link, and select "Copy link address", and then open a new tab, paste the link in the address bar, and press enter. I hope to resolve these in the next version. This makes Thorium the only modern browser that supports FTP anymore. Thorium also now registers as an FTP URL handler with the OS, but I have not tested if opening an ftp url in an external app will cause Thorium to open it correctly, or land you on that "about:blank#blocked" page. Feedback is requested. Thanks to @win32ss for modernizing some of the code, since obviously stuff has changed alot in the Chromium repo since 2021. I took his patches, and adapted/fixed them to work on the M124 Chromium revision(s).Published by Alex313031 6 months ago
M123
chrome://flags/#chrome-refresh-2023
& chrome://flags/#customize-chrome-side-panel
chrome://flags/#disable-thorium-icons
flag). > https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium/commit/ec8b741ecf60bf1cfc6e44428afb20764109430a
thorium_policy_templates.zip
file. > https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium/commit/dcf4dd9848eb2a3041896d00eec135d3281d17ec
--enable-logging --v=1 >> C:\place\where\you\want\debug.log
. The top of the logfile will print the Thorium brand name and version, and under that is my little memorial code. > https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium/commit/8c0850e25eb5946e33dbe400ce279630cfda87e7
disable-encryption
flag not working properly (for users of the portable .zips) > https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium/commit/1ac0e00cbca58628e4e24c779dddd65569c158b8 This should fix issues where Thorium signs you out of sites on every restart.Big news! On top of Thorium continuing to support Windows 7/8/8.1 (which I have been doing for a while now, since M110), Thorium now supports Windows XP and Windows Vista! I made a page dedicated to it, with an XP style theme similar to the Win7 page > https://thorium.rocks/xp/.
Download releases for all these Pre-Windows 10 OSes here > https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium-legacy/releases
This also means that Thorium now supports more OSes and architectures than ANY other browser on the market!. Windows XP - 11 x32, x64, and arm64. MacOS x64 and arm64. Linux x64 and Raspberry Pi arm64. And Android arm32, arm64, and x86.
Thanks to @gz83 for helping with Windows builds + policy templates, and @win32ss for providing the baseline patches used to restore Windows XP/Vista support.
Published by Alex313031 7 months ago
Nothing too special this release, just your standard Chromium upgrade.
However, five things:
chrome://flags/#autoplay-policy
Fixes https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium/issues/577, https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium/issues/564, https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium/issues/596, https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium/issues/586, https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium/issues/570, https://github.com/Alex313031/Thorium-MacOS/issues/45, https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium/issues/575, https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium/issues/572, https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium/issues/599, https://github.com/Alex313031/Thorium-Win/issues/176, https://github.com/Alex313031/Thorium-Win/issues/169, and https://github.com/Alex313031/Thorium-MacOS/issues/42
Also, I got more issues regarding people disliking the custom colored top bar icons. Reminder that since M121, I added a flag to disable these > chrome://flags/#disable-thorium-icons
Published by Alex313031 8 months ago
M121 Thorium's 30th version birthday!
libhighway
to 1.0.7, and libjxl
to 0.9.2. This should hopefully fix the JPEG-XL HDR issues some people reported. Should fix https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium-libjxl/issues/18
pdh.dll
and uxtheme.dll
from system32.kResponsiveToolbar
. This makes it where when the window size is too small to hold both the tabstrip and top bar buttons (for example if you have alot of pinned extensions), the top bar buttons will be moved to a little chevron overflow menu.chrome://settings/content/sound
chrome://flags/#disable-thorium-icons
. Rejoice! as I know many people don't like that I added blue and green colors to those. Note that icons used in the menus and settings still have blue colored triangles. I'm not gonna change those, as it's too much work and most people don't care about those. Fixes https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium/issues/307 and https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium/issues/66
_LIBCPP_HARDENING_MODE = _LIBCPP_HARDENING_MODE_FAST
, which hardens C++ code against flow integrity issues and memory overflows, while still keeping stuff fast compared to = 1
chrome://whats-new
page after I accidentally disabled it in M117.chrome://flags/#disable-download-bubble
, so if you changed this to restore the old download shelf, you will need to set it again.Published by Alex313031 9 months ago
M120
Added three new chrome://flags flags. These are:
chrome://flags/#vaapi-video-decode-linux-gl
to toggle using the GL backend for VAAPI acceleration (Linux only). Fixes https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium/issues/162
chrome://flags/#close-window-with-last-tab
which allows you to keep the application open when closing the last tab (i.e. closing the last tab will simply open a new blank one). Fixes https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium/issues/338
chrome://flags/#allow-insecure-downloads
to fix the annoying issue where Thorium won't download files if they come from http:// ftp:// or "mixed origins" i.e. an http:// download initiated by an https:// page. Fixes https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium/issues/509
IMPORTANT: Since we are building AVX2 and SSE3 releases every time now, I'm just gonna release them all here (Except the Windows on ARM versions). The Thorium-Win-AVX2 and Thorium-SSE3 repos will have an empty release redirecting users to this repo from now on. I will need to contact @ltguillaume in order to fix Thorium WinUpdater because of this.
Thanks again @gz83 for helping me make the builds.
Published by Alex313031 10 months ago
M119 (M118 was too old, so skipped that version)
chrome://flags#disable-aero
This disables transparency effects and GPU accelerated window frame compositing (while still leaving GPU acceleration for the actual web contents intact). It is useful if you dislike transparency, or are getting glitches on Windows 11 with the window frame.chrome://flags/#storage-access-api
flag I added to enable it.chrome://flags#download-bubble
chrome://flags#tab-hover-cards
Allows removing tab hover card images, and instead replace with a tooltip (the behavior before M106).Published by Alex313031 about 1 year ago
--enable-blink-features=MiddleClickAutoscroll
(and I removed the warning bar for people who do). Fixes > https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium/issues/199
Published by Alex313031 about 1 year ago
M116
chrome://whats-new
page has been re-enabled by me, after Google made it "Chrome only". You will see it launch in a new tab on every version upgrade.initial_preferences
file is now included in the Windows installer, to show the Welcome page on first launch after the first install.Thanks @gz83 @ltguillaume for helping.
Also, on another note, people have been complaining about me not releasing a new version on the exact same day as a new major Chromium version. To those people, I say, every major version takes me about 6+ Hours of intensive work to rebase. This is followed by many more hours for both me and @gz83 and @midzer to build each version, and this is assuming we are using all of our CPU cores pegged at 100% usage, which also slows our machines to a crawl for if we want to do anything else. Please be patient. If people still make issues or discussions about this, my response will be going forward: Then you try maintaining a Chromium fork!
Published by Alex313031 about 1 year ago
M115 : This release is all about bug fixes, rather than new features.
Might also fix other strange tabstrip bugs that people experienced in M114.
Next release we are planning to update libjxl and add a "Close tabs to the left" menu item.
Published by Alex313031 about 1 year ago
Published by Alex313031 over 1 year ago
CHROME_EXTRA_FLAGS
environment variable. For example:export CHROME_EXTRA_FLAGS="--no-sandbox"
and then running thorium-browser
from the same shell, will append --no-sandbox. You could set this in your ~/.bashrc or /etc/profile However, keep in mind that Thorium already also has a custom way to set default flags, by making/editing ~/.config/thorium-flags.conf
enable_media_foundation_widevine_cdm = true
args.gn flag (should hopefully fix https://github.com/Alex313031/Thorium-Win/issues/48 and https://github.com/Alex313031/Thorium-AVX2/issues/84)Published by Alex313031 over 1 year ago
113 brings better support for WebGPU, and enables it by default. You can test it on my site here > https://thorium.rocks/misc/webgpu-test/ There are still some bugs with Nvidia GPUs on Linux. M114 seems to fix this. If you want to force WebGPU on, you can enable the chrome://flags/#enable-unsafe-webgpu
flag. (I disabled the warning infobar with this flag since I use it alot, but know that by enabling it, malicious processes could potentially extract frames from GPU memory)
It also brings the new Performance pane in settings, to enable memory saver > chrome://settings/performance
This allows Thorium to sleep tabs in the background. Edge users will be familiar with this feature.
I had to remove HEVC/H.265 and AC3 support temporarily. M114 will have it back again, so stay on M112 if you need this. This is because the guy who makes the patch skipped M113, and HEVC support is a prerequisite for my custom AC3 patch. I could manually patch ffmpeg by looking at how the M112 patch was formatted. But thats alot of files, more than Thorium as a whole even uses. Sooooooo....Sorry....LoL. Like I said, use 112 or wait until 114 if you wanna watch H.265 videos or AC3 audio.
4 new flags:
Two features I had previously enabled by default were removed upstream. I re-added them, but this time I put them behind two new flags > chrome://flags/#tab-outlines-in-low-contrast-themes
and chrome://flags/#prominent-dark-mode-active-tab-title
. They are disabled by default, and so in dark mode/incognito mode you will see a reversion back to the stock Chromium tabstrip theme. If you want the old behavior and look that Thorium has had since M100, simply enable these flags. Putting them behind flags was partially in response to this issue.
Then, the other two are flags from UnGoogled, one of which I modified.
chrome://flags/#scroll-tabs
The default behavior on Linux is to have this on. On other platforms you had to use a cmdline flag. Now, you can control it through the UI for ALL platforms (even Android). This is different from the scrollable tabstrip flag here > chrome://flags/#scrollable-tabstrip which moves the entire tabstrip. The one I added simply changes which tab is active (which I think is more useful).chrome://flags/#keep-all-history
This is the one I modified. Chromium by default only keeps history for 90 days. I raised this to 120 days. By enabling this flag, it will keep history forever. Note that this could cause your user profile dir to grow up to its maximum allowed of 2GB, if you were to enable this flag and then browse for ~many months, etc.Also I am proud to finally announce a new ThoriumOS release. Updated many packages, it uses Thorium 113, and it has Google Drive support and NVidia GPU support!! Get it here > https://github.com/Alex313031/ThoriumOS/releases/tag/V113.0.5672.177
Published by Alex313031 over 1 year ago
M112
M112 versions newer than 112.0.5615.137 fix important security vulnerabilities. See > CVE-2023-2136 and CVE-2023-2135
– Enabled AC3 for MacOS
– More compiler optimizations thanks to @RobRich999 See > https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium/commit/18ef7450f3675a2ec3aaba54b6b1ea8b215003cb
– Added LLD Tail Merging for Windows
– Added some new keyboard shortcuts:
"Ctrl+Shift+Q"
to close all windows (exit)"Ctrl+Shift+K"
to open a new tab to the right"Ctrl+Shift+D"
to duplicate the current tab"Ctrl+Shift+P"
to pop out the current tab into a new windowKnown Issue: Text highlighting doesn't work on some sites. It will still copy/paste, just sometimes won't highlight what you are selecting. @midzer and I are working on this.
IMPORTANT - Thorium for Windows 7/8/8.1 builds have been moved to their own repo > https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium-win7 , where development continues. I will no longer be posting builds of M109 here, and instead it will be there and of course on the https://thorium.rocks/win7 site.
Published by Alex313031 over 1 year ago
M109 Windows 7/8/8.1 Maintenance Release
IMPORTANT: PLEASE USE THE NEW WINDOWS 7/8 REPO HERE FOR FUTURE RELEASES > https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium-win7
As promised, here is a maintenance release of Thorium M109 for Windows 7/8/8.1!
Backported some stuff, and bumped minor rev number 109.0.5414.120 > 109.0.5414.139 which includes security fixes from upstream Chromium.
– Compiled with Polly enabled
– Pre-compiling of inline scripts enabled
– Added "Ctrl+Shift+Q"
keyboard shortcut to close all windows.
Backported more optimization flags for V8, Chromium's Javascript engine, from the M111 release.
Backported five new new chrome://flags flags from the M110 & M111 release:
– chrome://flags/#force-gpu-mem-available-mb - Set available VRAM to be used by Thorium. Options are 128, 256, 512, and 1024 Mb. Useful for systems with very low or very high video memory. The default (if unset) is 512 Mb.
– chrome://flags/#enable-native-gpu-memory-buffers - Enable native CPU-mappable GPU memory buffer support on Linux. (Linux only) You can see the effect of this on chrome://gpu in the "GpuMemoryBuffers Status" section.
– chrome://flags/#double-click-close-tab - A flag that @gz83 came up with and we both implemented. Allows you to close a tab by simply double-clicking on it, similar to an option in Vivaldi.
– chrome://flags/#show-fps-counter - Show a F.P.S. counter on each display, which also shows used/available GPU memory. Useful for Web development.
– chrome://flags/#media-router
to enable/disable the media router, i.e. for Cast.
Logo has had padding removed, and a new logo was created for the windows installer .exe.
Thorium mascot image added to chrome://version page, under the copyright (for fun)
Published by Alex313031 over 1 year ago
M111
– Added two new flags:
chrome://flags/#media-router
to enable/disable the media router, i.e. for Cast.chrome://flags/#close-confirmation
modified from an ungoogled flag. Prompts the user before closing browser window(s) if enabled. Options are 'last window' and 'multiple windows'Compiled with Polly enabled
– Pre-compiling of inline scripts enabled
– Added "Ctrl+Shift+Q"
keyboard shortcut to close all windows.
– Added snap support
Published by Alex313031 over 1 year ago
M110 is shaping up to be a great release!
– Two new flags from ungoogled chromium, to enable truly portable usage were added. They unencrypt your user data dir, and remove tying it to a specific machine. Meaning you can drag the .zip around with you from machine to machine, and you wont lose passwords, extensions, etc. You will need to back up your current config, or start with a fresh one. I.E. you can go from Unencrypted > Encrypted, but not Encrypted (the default) > Unencrypted. I should have introduced these a long time ago. Sorry if this annoys users of the portable .zips. Note that enabling these flags is inherently less secure.
They are:
chrome://flags/#disable-encryption and
chrome://flags/#disable-machine-id
Published by Alex313031 over 1 year ago
IMPORTANT: PLEASE USE THE NEW WINDOWS 7/8 REPO HERE FOR FUTURE RELEASES > https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium-win7
NOTE: Going forward, Thorium will be built to more stable versions. This one is based on M109 stable (see below), future versions will be based on the equivalent of "beta" or "dev" channel, rather than tip-o-tree, i.e. "canary" channel.
IMPORTANT M109 is the last version of Chromium for Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 😢 as per Here. I still use and enjoy Windows 7, and so have made a site for it here > https://thorium.rocks/win7 This is why this release is based on stable M109. I will be updating the links on my win7 page to link to these. Another deviation from standard Thorium releases, is that the windows 7 release will have a special 32 bit SSE2 build for old computers, on top of the SSE3, AVX, and AVX2 builds. There is also a small easter egg on the chrome://version page, to show love for one of Micro$oft's greatest OSes, back when that $ sign was a little smaller, lol.
M109 will also be getting maintenance releases for the Win7/8/8.1 version, tracking the official chrome stable versions as per https://chromiumdash.appspot.com/releases?platform=Windows and I will be attempting to backport patches from M110 into M109, as time and knowledge permits.
@gz83 @midzer