Thorium for Windows XP / Vista / 7 / 8 / 8.1  

Chromium fork named after radioactive element No. 90, Old Windows NT builds!

• Always built with the latest stable version 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.

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)
• 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 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-win7/blob/main/docs/BUILDING.md

Debugging

See > https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium-win7/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/

 − 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/

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Thanks for using Thorium!