Thorium

Chromium fork for linux named after radioactive element No. 90. Windows/MacOS/RasPi/Other builds see below.

Always built with the latest stable version build of Chromium.
Intended to behave like and have the featureset of Google Chrome, with differences/patches/enhancements listed below.
Includes Widevine, All Codecs, Chrome Plugins, as well as thinLTO, CFlag, LDFlag, LLVM Loop, and PGO compiler optimizations. It is built with SSE4, AVX, and AES, so it won't launch on CPU's below 2nd gen Core or AMD FX, but benefits from Advanced Vector EXtensions. You can disable this and build with regular SSE3 like Chromium and Chrome, or use builds from Thorium Special, some of which are SSE4 only. (See below.)

Other Builds

– I also build for Windows > Thorium Win You can also find SSE4 builds for Windows here.
– AVX2 Builds for Windows and Linux > Thorium AVX2 (source files for AVX2 are here in the "other" directory, as well as files for SSE4 and Polly builds.)
– MacOS (M1 and X64) and Raspberry Pi (arm64) Builds, as well as Special and Experimental builds, sometimes for other CPUs (read the Readme), are located at > Thorium Special You can also find builds for Piledriver/Steamroller/Excavator CPUS, Haswell CPUs, as well as SSE4 Linux builds. (source files are here in the "arm" directory)
– NEW: Thorium Website with deb repo for auto-updating on Linux > https://thorium.rocks/
– NEW: Windows 7 / 8 / 8.1 / Server 2012 builds in > Thorium Win7

FEATURES & DIFFERENCES BETWEEN CHROMIUM AND THORIUM

Various compiler flags that improve performance and target AVX CPU's (read PATCHES.md)

Experimental MPEG-DASH support.

HEVC/H.265 support on Linux and Windows.

JPEG XL Image File Format turned on by default.

Enable Live Caption (SODA) on all builds.

Experimental PDF annotation support (called "Ink" on ChromiumOS). # DISABLED FOR NOW BECAUSE OF CRASHES.

Patches from Debian including font rendering patch, VAAPI Patch, Intel HD support patch, native notifications patch, title bar patch, and... the VDPAU Patch!! (Rejoice Nvidia users)

VAAPI on Wayland Patch (Thanks AUR and @pierro78)

Audio Sandbox patch.

DoH (DNS over HTTPS) patches from Bromite.

Enable Do Not Track by default patch from Vanadium.

Show full URLs including trailing slashes in address bar by default.

Disable FLOC patch.

Disable annoying Google API Key Infobar warning (you can still use API Keys to enable sync) from Ungoogled Chromium.

Disable annoying Default Browser Infobar warning.

Adds DuckDuckGo, Brave Search, Ecosia, Ask.com, and Yandex.com in US and other locales, along with the normal search engines.

Always use the local NTP (New Tab Page) regardless of search engine.

Fix icons when distilling page content in Reader Mode.

Enable new Menu UI when right clicking the Reload button. (Adds 'Normal Reload', 'Hard Reload', and 'Clear Cache and Hard Reload')

Home button and Chrome Labs shown by Default.

Prefetch settings updated to respect privacy.

Patches for GN and chrome_sandbox when building.

Remove the addition of the Chrome APT sources.list during installation.

Widevine CDM Patch for Linux.

GTK auto dark mode patch

Various new flags either developed from scratch, or added from Ungoogled Chromium. See PATCHES.md

Enable Parallel Downloading by Default.

Inclusion of pak (Linux) and pak_mingw (Windows), a utility for packing and unpacking the *.pak files in Thorium or any other Chromium based browser.

Logo and Branding/Naming changed to the Thorium logo, Thorium name, and "Alex313031" being appended to "The Chromium Authors" in credits, etc.

.desktop file includes useful cmdline flags that enable experimental or useful features. (See PATCHES.md)

Includes installer patches and files to include ChromeDriver and thorium_shell (content_shell), with a .desktop file being provided for thorium_shell (named thorium-shell.desktop and shows in desktop environments as Thorium Content Shell). These are also included in the Windows releases, but it doesn't make a shorcut, although a .png and .ico is in the install directory for you to make your own shortcut with an icon. You can also run content_shell with the command thorium-shell (custom wrapper for it, located in /usr/bin/). You can run ChromeDriver at /usr/bin/chromedriver or chromedriver.exe on Windows. Also, patches for abseil library and mini_installer when building with AVX on Windows.

Right clicking the launcher after install gives three additional desktop actions, one to open thorium-shell, another to open in Safe Mode which disables any flags one has set in chrome://flags until the next launch, and lastly to open in Dark Mode which appends the --force-dark-mode flag.

For more info, read the PATCHES.md file.
Known bugs are in the BUGS.md file.
A list of Chromium command line flags can be found at > https://peter.sh/experiments/chromium-command-line-switches

Building

See > https://github.com/Alex313031/Thorium/blob/main/docs/BUILDING.md

Debugging

See > https://github.com/Alex313031/Thorium/tree/main/infra/DEBUG#readme

− https://www.reddit.com/r/ChromiumBrowser/ is a subreddit I made for Thorium and general Thorium/Chromium discussion, https://thorium.rocks/ is the website I made for it, and https://alex313031.blogspot.com/ is a blog I made relating to Thorium/ThoriumOS.
− I also build ChromiumOS (now called ThoriumOS) with Thorium, Codecs, Widevine, linux-firmware/modules, and extra packages at > https://github.com/Alex313031/ChromiumOS/

NOTE: libpepflashplayer.so is included for posterity and can be used to enable Adobe Flash on older Chromium releases. ʘ‿ʘ

Thanks for using Thorium!

jetiny / thorium