M128.0.6613.189 - 42nd Release

M128
Thorium 2024 UI "Th24" is complete. Please see the past 3 beta releases if you aren't up to speed about it. On top of those, we now:

• Have the restored bookmarks folder icon used in the bookmarks ui and bookmarks bar
• Fixed spacing of the new tab button
• Added 180px as an option to the new custom-tab-width chrome flag
• Tab separators are 2px again after I had temporarily reverted back to 1px
• More WebUI stuff is reverted to its pre-Chrome 2023 appearance.
• I am writing a full write-up/explainer on what Cr23 is, what Th24 is, and why I made it. It will have pictures to illustrate as well. It isn't finished yet but you can find it Here.

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Now, other stuff:

• New flag chrome://flags#classic-omnibox "classic omnibox". When enabled, the omnibox (i.e. url bar) takes on a more squareish shape similar to classic versions of Chromium/Chrome. It was adapted from the same flag in Supermium, but I adjusted the radius, and I fixed an issue with stuff not showing up quite right when the omnibox is focused, i.e. when the results are all showing up. Might make a pull request upstream.
• The Thorium 2024 flag was added to "Chrome Labs" to make it easier to enable than going to chrome://flags. Just click the "beaker" icon (actually an Erlenmeyer flask lol) in the top bar, and you can enable it there.
• New flag chrome://flags/#remove-tabsearch-button to remove the tab search button from the tab strip.
• The bug on Linux where me setting it to the classic theme by default was causing crashes is now fixed.
• I finally added some background music to the Chrome Dino game. You can hear it on chrome://dino
• Added a new WebUI page chrome://eggs that has images from the easter egg contest on it.
• I enabled the Customize Toolbar feature ahead of schedule (the official stable enabled by default release was in M129). This lets you add a bunch of stuff to the toolbar.
• The size of the main menu button (aka the "hamburger menu" or "three dots menu") has been corrected to be smaller
• Better compiler tuning on MacOS
• New flag chrome://flags#transparent-tabs, which makes tabs semi-transparent (Windows only)
• Limits of MV3 were removed. A MV3 extension like UBlock Origin Lite, if it were coded to take advantage of Thorium, now has limits on declarativeNetRequest that are similar to MV2. Thorium still intends to restore MV2 code when the time comes, but I thought this would be an interesting experiment. I might try to fork Ublock, so if you're interested in this, watch my GitHub account for a new repo.

Includes a build of Thorium UI Debug Shell (AVX only)
TODO: Fix alignment of tab search button, fix FTP link clicking.

BETA 2 Th24 build - M126.0.6478.251

• It has the same Th24 updates/fixes as the Beta 2 Linux build, so read those release notes here first > https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium/releases/tag/M126.0.6478.251 (And if you haven't used any of the beta builds yet, you should read the Beta 1 release notes to get up to speed about what all this Th24 stuff is about)
• On top of the fixes from the beta 2 Linux build, this release also:
• Force enables MV2 extensions at a lower level (Previous releases just set an enterprise policy flag to "On", this release enables it at the //components/extensions/ source code level)
• New chrome://flags flag "Custom Tab Width" 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.
• Fixes menu spacing issues on Windows and MacOS to even more closely match the pre-CR23 style.
• Adds a new simple 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).
• Fixes some more spacing issues in the bookmarks bar
• Fixes spacing issue of tab separators, which made the horizontal padding between inactive tabs be wider than the vertical padding. I also went ahead and set the separators to 2 pixels wide instead of 1, so that deviates a bit from the pre-CR23 UI, but I think it looks better, and makes it easier to distinguish tabs when you have a billion of them in a single window (which I'm very guilty of doing). Speaking of that, Thorium's performance optimizations really show their shine when "hypertasking". For example, I tested Chrome M126 and Thorium M126, and found their speedometer 3.0 scores to be about identical, but when I tested them by opening 1,000 tabs spread across 10 windows (100 tabs per window), they used the same amount of RAM, but the CPU usage of Thorium was much less, and Thorium remained much more responsive than Chrome did, under such a heavy load. This is to be expected since AVX instructions lend themselves particularly well to very large datasets/transfers, and large matrix multiplication tasks (which are used in Chromium). I didn't test the SSE3/SSE4 builds. They will probably still perform better than Chrome, but they will definitely be less since they don't have AVX/AVX2 support. Related to the notes about AVX above, this is also why things like RAID software, databases, and machine vision/machine learning software are often compiled with AVX support.

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.

BETA "Th24" build - M126.0.6478.251

– 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.)

1. Why are tabs half the height? Stupid.
2. Why are tab separators and padding doubled, (3px vs 6px) meaning less tabs can fit in the tabstrip for a given window size before they "overflow" and can't be seen? Dumb!
3. Why is the bookmarks bar taller than either the address bar or the tabstrip. Makes it look out of balance.
4. Why are icons, font size, padding, and separators in menus SO BIG. This looks ugly, and I have already gotten issues on github about them being so big that people on smaller screens right click on something, and then they have to SCROLL just to get to what they want. Menus should not have a scrollbar on the side because the content is so big it can't fit. Bad user experience.
5. Why is the separator between all the top bar content, and the webpage's frame, rounded at the corners? Similarly, why are all buttons super rounded, even to the point where I have seen bugs upstream about the button's text being clipped out of view. Unneeded and dumb.
6. Why does the Downloads page (i.e. chrome://downloads) require a menu press and then a second button press to remove an item. It used to just be an "X". This makes clearing out your downloads manually (instead of "Clear All", which often we don't want), take FOREVER.
7. Why are WebUI pages all of a sudden "mangled" on the javascript side? This makes inspection and debugging VERY DIFFICULT for browser devs like me, and decreases transparency for any end user that just wants to see how the page is layed out. I get minifying the javascript to save space, but why are we mangling it which serves nothing but to obfuscate things?
8. Why are omnibox icons so huge that they appear mis-sized for the omnibox height? They were fine as they were.

➕ 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:

• Tab height is restored
• Tab padding is reduced (but not restored, for aesthetic reasons)
• Bookmark bar height is restored
• Menus, their size, and square shape, are all restored (except for menus in the omnibox for some reason?)
• Reduced the rounded-ness of buttons and the separator described in No. 5.
• Downloads Page has the "X" buttons on items again
• Minor revision updated to .251, which includes two security fixes for WebAssembly

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.

M126.0.6478.231 - 41st Release

M126

• This is also Thorium's 30th major version anniversary. Very first Thorium was based on M96.
• Skipped M125 because it was too old. I was house-sitting for my dad/stepmom while they were away on a month long trip. I didn't have access to my workstation which I really need to do anything more than minor development work.
• (Linux Only) 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
• Google Hangouts component extension was removed, following concerns about privacy. However, if you use hangouts frequently and would like this extension back, see this ReadMe. Closes Alex313031/thorium#743, Alex313031/thorium#740, Alex313031/thorium#449, Alex313031/thorium#410
• The Chrome Refresh 2023 UI is now the default.
• I moved the tab search button back to the right of the tabstrip. I think it was a bad decision to put it on the left in the 2023 UI. However, if you prefer it on the left (to have Thorium's UI match Chrome's), enable the new chrome://flags/#left-aligned-tab-search-button flag I added.
• Another performance bump due to some new PGO configs courtesy of @RobRich999. See this commit. In some limited testing it got better Speedometer 3.0 scores than Chrome.
• libjxl updated to 0.10.3
• The keep-all-history flag was fixed. It would sometimes corrupt dates of history entries when enabled.
• Disabled some more "Privacy Sandbox" APIs
• Manifest V2 support force enabled (Starting in M128 they are experimenting with disabling MV2). It will be completely removed in M136 (10 months from now), and when they finally do remove the actual code for loading MV2 extensions, it will be restored, because F**k Google! Even if it takes a crapload of work, I am determined to restore it, because without UBlock Origin working properly in Thorium, I wouldn't even want to use my own browser! If you want to use other Chromium based browsers, you will eventually be out of luck, and will either need to use Firefox, or find another Chromium fork that has MV2 support when the time comes.
• New flag 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

M124.0.6367.218 - 40th Release

M124

• AC3/E-AC3 Audio support restored. It was disabled in the last couple of versions due to ffmpeg changes. Dolby Atmos audio is also restored. Note that for ARM/ARM64 builds, it is still disabled, due to incompatibilities with how Chromium loads the libffmpeg library.
• WebRTC (used for real-time communication like video chats, i.e. Zoom, for example) can now use H.265/HEVC (recent upstream Chromium feature) on devices without hardware decoding support (Thorium feature). This is good because H.265 compression means that you will have less stuttery streams if you are on a bandwidth limited connection.
• Fingerprinting protection patch added. Note this isn't a safety blanket, and doesn't mean Thorium will remove all types of fingerprint tracking it just makes it better than normal Chromium/Chrome. I would like to expand on this in the next version by adding a setting to enable the Global Privacy Control header, alongside the "Do Not Track" setting, which is also enabled by default in Thorium.
• Added flag to enable/disable Side Panel Journeys, which can be annoying. chrome://flags#side-panel-journeys
• Added flag to enable/disable showing the built in internal extensions that are normally hidden. They are now hidden by default (like in normal Chromium), but can be re-enabled with 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.
• The Side Panel Chrome Customization feature now works even if Chrome Refresh 2023 UI is disabled (Thorium has it disabled by default). However, fixing this this led to an unforeseen minor issue, that I didn't catch until everything was already built. Even if Chrome Refresh 2023 is enabled with the 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.
• The entire browser now respects Gamma/Alpha settings that the user has set for the display (Windows only for now). It is unknown how this will play with Thorium's JPEG-XL support. Feedback requested.
• New commandline flag to disable the custom Thorium DNS config. Normally, Thorium uses two patches, to make DNS queries more privacy respecting, and to use DNS over HTTPS (DoH) by default, which is more secure and can't be intercepted by "man in the middle" attackers. However, this was breaking some people's configurations, especially when they had manually set DNS options in the OS, or were using external third party apps that change DNS settings (like VPN services). So, if you pass the --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.
• 32 Bit Linux is now supported, however I am not going to be regularly building binaries. But it is at least supported at the source code level again. There is an M123 release available. Note that Ubuntu 16.04 is not supported.
• FTP support restored! Chromium and Firefox both removed all support for 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).
• I enabled a feature that is normally disabled, that allows you to configure more options for PWA (Progressive Web App) windows. See the settings while in a PWA to see the extra options.
• Global Media Controls (this little icon in the top bar > ) can be disabled again. I had enabled a feature that updates the UI on ChromiumOS/ThoriumOS, but it had the unforeseen effect of force-enabling it on other platforms.
• Major vulnerability CVE-2024-4671 is fixed in this version.

M123.0.6312.133 - 39th Release

M123

• 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:\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. > 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

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.

M122.0.6261.132 - 38th Release

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)

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

M121.0.6167.204 - 37th Release

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, Alex313031/thorium#551, and 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.

M120.0.6099.235 - 36th Release

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

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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.

M119.0.6045.214 - 35th 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.
• 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).
• Added SSE3 builds for people without AVX-capable CPUs