M126.0.6478.246 - 10th Release

M126

• Fixed crashing on fresh install

Other than that, nothing new so here's the Linux release notes copy/pasted:

• 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.
• 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 - 9th 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. Android support is dependent on the device.
• 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.
• 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 - 8th 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 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 >> /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
• 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.

ARM32 BUILDS COMING SOON PENDING SOME DEBUGGING
UPDATE: Uploaded arm32 builds.

M122.0.6261.132 - 7th Release

• 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, Alex313031/Thorium-Win#176, Alex313031/Thorium-Win#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.
• JPEG-XL (JXL) Support Restored! It was broken in the android builds in M120 and M121
• Added experimental x64 build

Sorry for getting these builds out late compared to the other platforms. Still no arm64 system webview, pending bug resolution in some Rust modules.

Remember, Thorium_Public is the main browser, Thorium_Shell is a "mini browser", and SystemWebView should only be used by people who know what that is and how to use it.

M121.0.6167.204 - 6th 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
• 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).
• 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.
• 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.

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• More SIMD optimizations in the arm64 versions.
• System Webview should now work since the internal manifest name was changed from upstream.
• But...... No arm64 webview apks this time around, I was getting strange Rust errors. Will probably be fixed upstream by the next release. You can still try to install the arm32 version though.

M120.0.6099.235 - 5th Release

M120

• More optimization flags as per guidance from @RobRich999 here > RobRich999/Chromium_Clang#26 (comment)
• Blocked annoying obtrusive promos like "Show me how to change the background"
• Added a new right-click/long press menu item to "Save video frame" which you can use to save a .png of the current paused frame.
• Added a new chrome://flags flag:
• 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
  NOTE: The arm64 version does not support JPEG XL (libjxl). This will be fixed in the next release.

M119.0.6045.214 - 4th 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).
• 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.
• 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
• 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).

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Google Sync does not work. This is an upstream thing, with Google being a dick once again and restricting it to browsers who pay a fee to get added to a whitelist. I still include the API Keys because location services does not work without them.

Lastly, people were confused about what to download. In general, you should download the "arm64" versions of things. The arm32 versions are only for very old devices with 32 bit CPUs. The main browser is "Thorium_Public", and the "Thorium_Shell" can be thought of as a "mini browser". The system web view should only be installed by people who are familiar with what that is and if their phone's OS will allow them to change the system webview from the default Google one to the Thorium compiler optimized one.
Thanks @gz83 for helping me build these releases while I work on Thorium M119 for Windows 7

M117.0.5938.157 - 3rd Release

• System WebView now has both 32 bit and 64 bit variants.
• 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.

NOTE: The arm64 releases will come soon, they were crashing for me, I need to investigate and rebuild.
UPDATE: Fixed

M116.0.5845.169 - 2nd 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 - 1st Seperate 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 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.