AVX2 MIGRATIONS

Since we are always making AVX2 and SSE3 Windows releases now, I decided to conglomerate the repos, and now all the Windows builds will be released in the same repo > https://github.com/Alex313031/Thorium-Win/releases

(Except the Windows on ARM releases which can still be found at https://github.com/Alex313031/Thorium-WOA)

If you are looking for AVX2 Linux releases, see > https://github.com/Alex313031/Thorium-Linux-AVX2

M119.0.6045.214 - 29th 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).

M117.0.5938.157 - 28th Release

• 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.

M116.0.5845.169 - 27th Release

M116

• 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!

M115.0.5790.172 - 26th 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 Alex313031/thorium#199
• REMOVED Wayland VAAPI patch as it was causing too many bugs for too many people to be worth it. - Fixes Alex313031/thorium#162
• Tabstrip window dragging bug fix for Windows (and possibly Linux and Mac, pending further investigation). - Fixes Alex313031/thorium#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 #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.

25th 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 25th Release! 🥳

24th 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 Alex313031/thorium#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 #84)
• RPM support so that people on those distros don't have to use the .zip or .appimage anymore. (Fixes Alex313031/thorium#139)
• Debian 12 "Bookworm" Support

23rd Release - M113.0.5672.177

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

22nd 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 (Custom Thorium patch based on previous AC3 patch for Windows/Linux)
– More compiler optimizations thanks to @RobRich999 See > Alex313031/thorium@18ef745 (These are only applicable to the x64 version)
– Added LLD Tail Merging for Windows
– Also includes a fresh build of Thorium UI Debug Shell for you tinkerers out there. This was actually used to test the replacement of the inline .png "radioactive" icon on chrome://flags with a .svg that is now embedded into the resources.pak file. I always liked this icon and hated when they removed it in Chromium M91. So I re-added it in Thorium M102 but you should really not use an inline .png file, it slows the rendering of pages. Since it now uses an external, very small (512 bytes!) .svg file, the flags page should load a little faster.
Here's the svg file if anyone wants it for something.

– 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

Sorry for not getting these out in a timely manner! They were built many days ago but I just didn't upload them Thank @gz83 for building these.

21st 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'

Compiled with Polly enabled

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