Thorium

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

• Always built with the latest LTS version of Chromium.
• Intended to behave like and have the featureset of Google Chrome, with differences/patches/enhancements listed below.
• Compiler optimizations such as LTO, CFlag, LDFlag, LLVM Loop, and PGO, to make it FAST. :boom:
  In addition, we release builds tailored to different CPUs with different SIMD instructions, for even more execution speed. We offer SSE3, SSE4, AVX, and AVX2 builds, named as such in the Releases. If you are unsure which one to download, see About SIMD.

Other Builds            

 – Windows builds are here > Thorium Win
 – MacOS (M1 and X64) builds are located at > Thorium Mac
 – Android (arm32 & arm64) builds are located at > Thorium Android
 – Raspberry Pi builds are located at > Thorium Raspi For the Pi 3B/3B+ and Pi 4/400.
 – Special builds are located at > Thorium Special You can find 32 bit builds for old CPUs here.
 – Thorium Website with deb repo for auto-updating on Linux > https://thorium.rocks/
 – NEW: Windows XP / Vista / 7 / 8 / 8.1 builds at > Thorium Legacy

FEATURES & DIFFERENCES BETWEEN CHROMIUM AND THORIUM

• Various compiler flags that improve performance and target AVX CPU's (read PATCHES.md)
• Experimental MPEG-DASH support.
• Includes Widevine, All Codecs, and proper HEVC/H.265 support on Linux and Windows.
• JPEG XL Image File Format support restored and turned on by default.
• FTP URL support restored and enabled by default.
• Restore the classic Chrome UI from before M124, instead of the new "Chrome Refresh 2023" UI. See the Explainer. Enable the flag chrome://flags/#thorium-2024 to try it!
• Restore the classic "Download Shelf". Enable the flag chrome://flags/#download-shelf to use it.
• Patches from Debian including font rendering patch, VAAPI Patch, Audio Sandbox, GPU drivers, GTK auto dark mode, native notifications patch, title bar patch, and... the VDPAU Patch! (Rejoice Nvidia users)
• DoH (DNS over HTTPS) patches from Bromite.
• Enable Do Not Track by default.
• Add and enable Global Privacy Control.
• Show full URLs including trailing slashes in address bar by default.
• Disable FLOC and "Privacy Sandbox".
• Disable annoying Default Browser Infobar warning.
• Disable annoying IPH (In Product Help) promos.
• 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, Chrome Labs button, and Bookmarks bar 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.
• Various new flags either developed from scratch, or added from Ungoogled Chromium. See PATCHES.md
• Enable Parallel Downloading by Default.
• Inclusion of pak 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.

 + Other patches and useful chrome://flags flags too long to list here. ʘ‿ʘ

• 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

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 − 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/

 − Thanks to https://github.com/robrich999/ for some info and fixes that went into this project.
 − Thanks to https://github.com/midzer/ for support and helping with builds.
 − Also thanks to https://github.com/bromite/bromite, https://github.com/saiarcot895/chromium-ubuntu-build, https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium, https://github.com/GrapheneOS/Vanadium, and https://github.com/iridium-browser/iridium-browser for patch code.
 − The pak_src dir, and the binaries in pack_src/bin are credited to @freeer https://github.com/myfreeer/chrome-pak-customizer/

Thanks for using Thorium!