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Thorium Browser Changelog

What's new in Thorium Browser 123.0.6312.133 Win 10/11

Apr 24, 2024
  • Enabled WebSQL by default (for things like Session Buddy 3)
  • More compiler optimizations in PGO (Linux-only for now) > Alex313031/thorium@acf69dd#diff-9b63dea0428a0efde7b9737c2b752678592868f64817cfbad4af4767d4bdfa84
  • More compiler optimizations (well, actually the removal of some LLVM flags) > Alex313031/thorium@c55c6b3
  • Disabled the ugly "Chrome Refresh 2023" UI by default Alex313031/thorium@ec8b741 however, if you decide you want it, set these two flags to true: chrome://flags/#chrome-refresh-2023 & chrome://flags/#customize-chrome-side-panel
  • If Chrome 2023 Refresh UI is enabled, then I added updated icons for the top bar (colored by default like usual, but can be made grey with the chrome://flags/#disable-thorium-icons flag). > Alex313031/thorium@ec8b741
  • Minor spacing and spelling fixes on some chrome:// pages that Thorium modifies. > Alex313031/thorium@8d050fc
  • Added Policy Templates for people wanting to set enterprise policies, or simply to see the available Windows Registry keys to control certain behaviors. These are identical to the ones for Chromium, except the directory names and registry key names have been changed to "Thorium" so that you don't have to do that yourself. They are in the thorium_policy_templates.zip file. > Alex313031/thorium@dcf4dd9
  • Added a Memorial easter egg dedicated to my Grandmother "Gramma Linda", who I spent the last month in the hospital with, and she sadly died March 23, 2024 at the age of 83. 😭 Born on Dec. 27th, 1940. You can view the easter egg by running Thorium from the cmdline with --enable-logging --v=1 >> C:placewhereyouwantdebug.log. The top of the logfile will print the Thorium brand name and version, and under that is my little memorial code. > Alex313031/thorium@8c0850e
  • The NTP page was broken when using a search engine other than Google, including the extra ones I added to some locales. I fixed it here > Alex313031/thorium@e113003
  • Fixed the disable-encryption flag not working properly (for users of the portable .zips) > Alex313031/thorium@1ac0e00 This should fix issues where Thorium signs you out of sites on every restart.
  • Updated libhighway in the libjxl repo to 1.1.0 > Alex313031/thorium-libjxl@1a4d1e7 for better SIMD optimization
  • Update libjxl to 0.10.2, which makes JPEG-XL rendering much faster, and fixes bugs when images were above a certain size > Alex313031/thorium-libjxl@fb2a3d6

New in Thorium Browser 119.0.6045.214 Win 7/8 (Mar 16, 2024)

  • Fixed the 32 bit builds

New in Thorium Browser 122.0.6261.132 Win 10/11 (Mar 15, 2024)

  • Nothing too special this release, just your standard Chromium upgrade.
  • However, five things:
  • Fixed the profile picker crash, which would cause Thorium to just segfault and crash without warning or any useful log output if you tried to add a new profile, OR if you had multiple profiles already added. This is my fault and I was being a dummy last release. Let me explain: Last release notes I said "Enabled AutoPlay toggle in Settings, I previously had it disabled due to a crash". Well I literally left myself a comment line to remind me what the crash was > Alex313031/thorium@5373a94#diff-67eea7cc5329808ed94c726a817ead2b1ac9a0d35a01e6360f553f7e63703572R1116 Yet I just tested to make sure the browser didn't crash on startup (which it wouldn't on my end because I only use one profile). I forgot to check by making a new profile(s). Thus, I declared the bug "fixed" when it really wasn't, and promptly got spammed with a bunch of sad people who's browsers were crashing. This was a stupid mistake on my part, and I'm sorry to anyone whos workflows got interrupted and the frustration that people were having. I will probably leave this setting disabled indefinitely, since I already added a chrome://flags flag to control this behavior anyway > chrome://flags/#autoplay-policy Fixes Alex313031/thorium#577, Alex313031/thorium#564, Alex313031/thorium#596, Alex313031/thorium#586, Alex313031/thorium#570, Alex313031/Thorium-MacOS#45, Alex313031/thorium#575, Alex313031/thorium#572, Alex313031/thorium#599, #176, #169, and Alex313031/Thorium-MacOS#42
  • Disabled some more "Privacy Sandbox" bullcrap
  • Added a patch from Ungoogled to disable captive portal detection. Note this won't work in all cases. Fixes Alex313031/thorium#528
  • This release is actually ahead of the version in official stable Chrome right now (.128 minor rev), as I spotted a nice security fix in V8 that was not landed until the .132 minor revision.
  • Thorium now installs the "dev" build of UBlock Origin (to better block YouTube ads)

New in Thorium Browser 121.0.6167.204 Win 10/11 (Feb 20, 2024)

  • M121 Thorium's 30th version birthday!
  • Disabled annoying feature promos like "Show me how to set Chrome's theme?" and "Do you want to take the privacy check now?". It wouldn't be so bad if these didn't appear randomly, and interrupt your workflow by blocking interaction with the rest of the browser until you click "Yes" or "Not right now". (Also notice how they say "Not right now" instead of "No". WTF is up with corporations doing this. It's subtle, but it's like psychologically saying "we'll let you say no now, but we expect you to change your decision later". Like no, leave me alone!).
  • Dolby Vision should now use proper color space info from your machine. Note that Dolby support still requires a hardware decoder to work at all, unlike HEVC/H.265 content which we added a patch to allow software decoding.
  • Updated 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 Alex313031/thorium-libjxl#18
  • On Windows, the mini_installer.exe unpacks itself faster due to an upstream change.
  • On Windows, preloading the browser, for example with background mode enabled, is now a little bit faster due to preloading pdh.dll and uxtheme.dll from system32.
  • Network Certificates now use the BoringSSL library (yes that's really its name), which is better overall than OpenSSL. (Don't worry, BoringSSL is still open source, and is actually a fork of OpenSSL).
  • Enabled a new Experimental feature, called 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.
  • Re-enabled a setting that I previously disabled due to crashes, which allows you to toggle AutoPlay settings at chrome://settings/content/sound
  • Added a much requested feature to be able to disable the colored custom top bar icons. You can now disable them with the flag > 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 Alex313031/thorium#307 and Alex313031/thorium#66
  • Prevented Thorium complaining about missing Vulkan drivers on non-Intel platforms. This has been a long standing issue in Chromium, but I'm not going to file a bug because it is used by their infrastructure.
  • Added Thorium's extra search engines to even more locales, including Mexico and Venezuela.
  • Completely disabled the "Privacy Sandbox" (previously known as FLOC), because it's a s**tshow, and not good for user's privacy at all. See > https://proton.me/blog/google-privacy-sandbox
  • Enabled a compiler flag called _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
  • Removed some extraneous LLVM opts
  • Re-enabled the chrome://whats-new page after I accidentally disabled it in M117.
  • More SIMD optimizations in the AVX2 versions.
  • I changed the download bubble flag name to chrome://flags/#disable-download-bubble, so if you changed this to restore the old download shelf, you will need to set it again.
  • Updated the documentation in the //docs directory, and on the site at https://thorium.rocks/docs which should allow you all to easily make your own builds now. Previously, following the docs which were very out of date (out of date for both upstream and because of the new build scripts added to the repo) would not yield a working browser. Fixes Alex313031/thorium#488, Alex313031/thorium#362, and Alex313031/thorium#551, Alex313031/thorium#477.
  • Added SSE3, AVX, and AVX2 builds for both Windows and Linux. I am deprecating the Thorium-Linux-AVX2, Thorium-SSE3, and Thorium-Win-AVX2 repos.

New in Thorium Browser 120.0.6099.235 Win 10/11 (Feb 19, 2024)

  • M120:
  • More optimization flags as per guidance from @RobRich999 here > RobRich999/Chromium_Clang#26 (comment)
  • Re-enabled component ffmpeg.dll (in case you ever wanted to replace it with a version that doesn't have proprietary codecs to make a "fully FOSS" build. Most people won't want this as it breaks media playback on alot of sites (including Widevine).
  • Added a new right-click menu item to "Save video frame" which you can use to save a .png of the current paused frame.
  • 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 Alex313031/thorium#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 Alex313031/thorium#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 Alex313031/thorium#509

New in Thorium Browser 109.0.5414.173 Win 7/8 (Jan 11, 2024)

  • Added SSE4 builds for people with Core 2 Duo, 1st Gen Core CPUs, AMD Bobcat, etc. This means that there will now be a release for everyone, no matter what your CPU is you should be able to run it.
  • Updated build scripts and args.gn files
  • Fixed SSE2 installer
  • Added a new chrome://flags flag > chrome://flags#disable-aero, it can be used to disable Aero compositing, and so disable transparent effects in the browser, regardless of the system setting.
  • Fixed some minor string issues, and clarified some Thorium flag descriptions
  • Updated Widevine to latest 4.10.2710.0 version
  • Fixed incorrect arch flags being set in the SSE3 V8 build.gn file > M109.0.5414.172...main#diff-20cdd25666642c5de0377e6e4b19c56f6746c8a78becad5b750e728b0cd6fd5e
  • Added tentative dir for the .patch files Thorium will use for M119 > https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium-win7/tree/main/patches#readme

New in Thorium Browser 119.0.6045.214 Win 10/11 (Jan 7, 2024)

  • Fixes multiple CVEs including GHSA-xm5p-7w7v-qqr5
  • Better HLS support
  • Better JavaScript compilation performance due to new Thorium compiler flags as well as upstream V8 re-workings.
  • Updated Widevine versions
  • The search engine choices that Thorium adds are now available in more locales. (Notably not in Russia or China because ya know, their governments not allowing certain URLs. Hong Kong and Ukraine are not affected).
  • Live Caption should now finally work (English only, sorry. The .grdp files for other languages are closed source for now).
  • ChromeCast can now use VP8 and VP9 codecs for less bandwidth consumption if you have slower internet. (Note that this is disabled by default in Chromium, I enabled it, but it is still experimental).
  • New chrome://flags flag 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.
  • Storage Access API was disabled because the security risk is more than the usability improvement. If you need this, use the new chrome://flags/#storage-access-api flag I added to enable it.
  • Keyboard shortcuts in ThoriumOS now align better with Linux.
  • Portable version now also sets the cache dir to ./.config/cache, to prevent any disk writes outside of the dir.
  • Rejoice! If you are like me and hate the new "Download bubble" and want the old "Download shelf" back, well I reverted a commit from upstream, and now there is a flag for it! > chrome://flags#download-bubble
  • Windows builds are now more hardened against memory overflows by enabling the arg "win_enable_cfg_guards = true"
  • PGO is now more effective (thanks @RobRich999) > Alex313031/thorium@5fe3937
  • New flag from Ungoogled-Chromium chrome://flags#tab-hover-cards Allows removing tab hover card images, and instead replace with a tooltip (the behavior before M106).

New in Thorium Browser 117.0.5938.157 (Oct 26, 2023)

  • Removed Linux middle click autoscroll by default because it caused bugs for some people. You can still enable it by using the cmdline flag --enable-blink-features=MiddleClickAutoscroll (and I removed the warning bar for people who do). Fixes > Alex313031/thorium#199
  • You can now choose to not show full URLs. Previously it was forced to true, and selecting/unselecting "Always show full URLs" would do nothing. It is now still enabled by default, but you can choose to unselect it. I will be making a PR to Ungoogled Chromium about this.
  • HEVC/H.265 decoding is now multi-threaded. Thanks to @RobRich999 for pointing this out and where to enable it.
  • Two major security vulnerabilities in libwebp and libvpx were fixed. See the new security policy for info about submitting security bugs, and a list of fixed vulnerabilities (which will be updated henceforth). If you use any of my Electron apps, those were also recently fixed.
  • On top of my Thorium-Win7 fork, which will soon be updated to be based on Supermium M118 (me and @gz83 are working on a unified patch for this), I also made a new repo: https://github.com/Alex313031/chromium-xp with ongoing work to resurrect Chromium on XP. I currently have fixed google search, compiling with the windows 10 sdk, and added Thorium's optimizations (minus AVX).
  • chrome_management_service should work properly now, if any of you out there are using Thorium with enterprise policies set.
  • Slightly higher Speedometer scores, due to both upstream optimizations, and me tweaking rustflags in the compiler config.