M119.0.6045.214 - 54th Release

First, to address the easter egg and website stuff, here is my explanation/apology post > https://alex313031.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-good-bad-and-ugly.html (it also addresses why I was gone for a month).

M119 (M118 was too old, so skipped that version)

• 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.
• Thorium on Linux with multiple monitors should now restore Thorium to the last monitor it was open on.
• 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) > 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).
• Added SSE3 builds for people without AVX-capable CPUs > https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium-sse3

M117.0.5938.157 - 53rd Release

UPDATE: I am back after a month, and during that month, some stuff happened with an inappropriate easter egg and some stuff I had on the site that people misunderstood. I also have some other news. It's a bunch of stuff and more than I can type here, so please wait till the next release, where I will have a full blog post/explanation/apology/response to all of the stuff, as well as a full explanation of what I am guilty of (and not guilty of). Although for the new user or someone updating, one thing I want to clear right away is there is nothing malicious in Thorium, its not a virus.

• Removed VDPAU patch as Chromium has unified the VAAPI backend. It didn't work half the time anyway. If you have an Nvidia card like me, sorry but we're stuck with software video decoding (except for H.264 with the FOSS nouveau drivers). This also removed 4 files that were always alot of work for me to rebase.
• 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 > #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.

M116.0.5845.169 - 52nd Release

M116

• The old VaapiVideoDecodeAccelerator path was completely removed upstream, in favour of the new VDAVideoDecoder backend that now powers both Chromium and ChromiumOS. Consequently, the VAAPI and Intel HD patches were removed. The VDPAU patch is now the only remaining graphics patch, for Nvidia users. This should hopefully fix issues people have been having with VAAPI and Wayland. Indeed some people have commented in this issue saying that a vanilla graphics backend works better than Thorium with all of the patches applied.
• 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.
• I enabled an experimental setting in Appearance to toggle tab hover cards. This can also be controlled via the traditional chrome://flags flag
• I enabled an upcoming UI design change that was supposed to land in M117, but I enabled it early. This moves the Extensions submenu from "More Tools" in the main menu, into its own dedicated menu item.
• New "Name Window" item in "More Tools". This allows you to manually override the window name, i.e. what appears in the window's title and what appears in the taskbar.
• initial_preferences file is now included in the Windows installer, to show the Welcome page on first launch after the first install.
• New internal variable specifying the type (i.e. AVX, AVX2, SSE3, etc.) is being shipped to facilitate the new Thorium-Win-Updater project me and ltguillaume have been working on, to allow auto update for Windows (Linux users already have it, if you are using the deb repo).

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!

[UPDATE] Look at this cool comparison a guy made, showing Thorium coming out on top in terms of performance when compared with other browsers! > https://giannirosato.com/blog/post/browser-benchmarks/ One thing I don't like about his methodology though, is that he also includes Safari on an iPad. iPad and desktop are not really comparable, giving the iPad a disadvantage, but also, since Apple ties their hardware and software together so tightly, they may get an advantage by being able to optimize safari specific to each ipad model in a way that is impossible with traditional desktop software that will run on a variety of machines.

M115.0.5790.172 - 51st Release

M115 : This release is all about bug fixes, rather than new features.

• Storage Access API enabled by default upstream. I actually have a web app on the Thorium website that can make use of this new web standard > https://thorium.rocks/misc/vector-icon-app/
• Added Middle Click AutoScroll for Linux (normally only enabled on Windows). Please report any bugs encountered - Fixes #199
• REMOVED Wayland VAAPI patch as it was causing too many bugs for too many people to be worth it. - Fixes #162
• Tabstrip window dragging bug fix for Windows (and possibly Linux and Mac, pending further investigation). - Fixes #197
• Profile picker crash fix. This was a major bug that occurred on all platforms, causing the browser to crash when trying to select a different profile other than the default one or guest one. Fixes Alex313031/Thorium-Win#58 and Alex313031/Thorium-Win-AVX2#95. The cause of it was narrowed down to this line, something completely unrelated code wise, but somehow caused a segmentation fault in the memory manager.
• NTP Discovery fix for Android (Not so much a "fix" but just removing it so it doesn't look ugly). - Fixes Alex313031/Thorium-Special#16 (comment)
• Fixed potential building problems on MacOS.

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.

50th Release - M114.0.5735.205

• Minor revision update to fix security vulnerabilities, as an interim release until M115 which will come in 2 weeks.
• Fixed minor WebUI images missing
  Otherwise, same release notes as the previous release.
   
• Happy 50th Release! 🥳

49th Release - M114.0.5735.134

M114

Upstream Changes

• Chromium 114 has even better support for WebGPU than 113. For more info about this, see the previous release notes.
• Chromium and Thorium now support specifying and appending commandline flags via the 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
• V8 (Chromium's JavaScript engine) has added some new optimizations to the Maglev compiler. A noticeable difference in JIT javascript compilation can be seen between Chromium 113 and 114. Interesting read here > https://blog.chromium.org/2023/06/how-chrome-achieved-high-scores-on.html Thanks @midzer for telling me about this.

Thorium Changes

• libjxl updated to 0.8.2 (Adds better transparency/alpha support) Thanks @gz83 for helping me with this.
• libhighway updated to 1.0.4 (Minor SIMD upgrade)
• Fixes for Wayland (should hopefully fix #162)
• HEVC and AC3 support have been restored (as promised)
• More Android ARM64 optimizations
• New "media foundation" widevine path on Windows by using the enable_media_foundation_widevine_cdm = true args.gn flag (should hopefully fix Alex313031/Thorium-Win#48 and Alex313031/Thorium-Win-AVX2#84)
• RPM support so that people on those distros don't have to use the .zip or .appimage anymore. (Fixes #139)
  IMPORTANT You will have to use sudo rpm --install --nodeps file.rpm because it tries to install libffmpeg.so.
• Debian 12 "Bookworm" Support

I am also working on a Flatpak, but I don't think I'm ever going to publicly release a snap of Thorium, because the performance is egregious, and I disagree with the walled garden practices that Canonical takes with snapcraft.
I would like help making the Flatpak, so if anyone out there knows about flatpak/flathub, don't hesitate to contact me, start a discussion, or submit a pull request.

48th Release - M113.0.5672.134

M113

Upstream Changes

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.

Thorium Changes

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

47th Release - M112.0.5615.166

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 > 18ef745
– 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 window

Also includes Thorium UI Debug Shell, since I haven't made a build of that in a while.

IMPORTANT - You should sudo apt remove thorium-browser-unstable if you are on M110 or earlier, before installing this, as the package name has changed from "thorium-browser-unstable", to just "thorium-browser". This will not affect your user data (even with apt purge)

46th Release - M111.0.5563.111

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'

– Pre-compiling of inline scripts enabled
– Added "Ctrl+Shift+Q" keyboard shortcut to close all windows.
– Added snap support

IMPORTANT - You should sudo apt remove thorium-browser-unstable before installing this, as the package name has changed from "thorium-browser-unstable", to just thorium-browser. This will not affect your user data (even with apt purge)

45th Release - M110.0.5481.178

M110 is shaping up to be a great release!

• JPEG-XL functionality RESTORED; thanks to @jonsneyers @mo271 and @gz83 for helping with this.
  There is a new repo for the source code for this, used as a submodule in this repo. > https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium-libjxl
  In case you didn't know, Google decided to be a d**k and remove JPEG-XL support after M109, as well as Windows 7/8/8.1 support.
• Thorium now supports the AC3 codec, including in HEVC/H.265 videos. Thanks to @midzer for helping find a patch, which I manually converted to work on M110.
• HEVC/H.265 videos now support all profiles.
• More optimization flags for V8, Chromium's Javascript engine.
• Added four new chrome://flags flags:
  – 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.
• Logo has had padding removed, and a new logo was created for the windows installer .exe.
• New desktop action on Linux, to "Open New Window with a temporary profile". This can be used even if Thorium is already running. It will make a new profile in /tmp, and use that. NOTE: Upon system restart, the /tmp dir is cleared.
• Thorium mascot image added to chrome://version page, under the copyright (for fun)