M138.0.7204.300 - 64th Release

Happy New Year Release!

Whoo 😅 It took a long while to get here. Many months without updates.
However, going forward, Thorium will be based on the latest LTS (Long Term Support) Chromium revision, which changes twice a year. This will let me focus on features, bug fixes, and keeping Thorium secure, instead of always having to do the long, tedious work of rebasing to a new major Chromium revision. With my new job, I simply don't have as much free time. M138 is the current one, M144 is going to be the new LTS in 2 months. In between, I can make minor updates to Thorium to address security concerns and major bugs.

• Th24 now 98% complete, good enough for a release, Ill fix minor stuff in a future build.
• Restored ability to install MV2 extensions from the web store (previously you would have to sideload a .crx, or keep MV2 extensions you already had installed in that user profile).
• Fixed the Download Shelf crash, so chrome://flags/#download-shelf works again for people like me who hate the new download bubble. (bug in prev. beta release)
• Fixed Notification settings crash that plagued the last release. (bug in prev. beta release)
• Fixed Google sync not working and fixed translate not showing on some sites (bug in prev. beta release)
• Added HEVC patches (bug in prev. beta release)
• Windows Installer now has a dialog asking if you want to install (use --silentcommandline switch to revert to old silent behaviour)

Also, thanks to @gz83 work, the FTP patch is restored and working! Since Supermium removed the FTP patch, this makes Thorium the only browser left on earth that still supports FTP. FTP users, continue as you were 😁

Known Issues:

1. Top bar window dragging space (above the tabs) when Window is unmaximized is too large on Windows and GTK3 (Linux)
2. Some colored icons are missing in WebUI (people who hate my colored icons will rejoice 😆 )
3. RPM might have wrong dependencies it thinks it needs, you might have to force install it
4. Ask.com was removed as a search engine.
5. Easter eggs page isn't working (need to find out why, patches are in there)

Windows build Here > https://github.com/Alex313031/Thorium-Win/releases/tag/138.0.7204.300

JAN. 5 EDIT: Corrected issue where "Open in Current Tab" was placed where "Open in New tab" used to be, which ruined muscle memory.

JAN. 8 EDIT: Uploaded .AppImages of the builds.

M138 Beta Release! [DONT DOWNLOAD ANYMORE]

1st M138 Beta build for the masses, after 9 months of no updates!

EDIT: NON-BETA RELEASE BUILDS ARE HERE: https://github.com/Alex313031/Thorium/releases/tag/M138.0.7204.300

M138.0.7204.193

• This is a raw beta build. Expect things to possibly not work properly.

• Only SSE3 builds, don't want to compile all the builds just for a beta

• Manifest V2 support restored!

• It is missing the FTP patches and HEVC software decoding patches, but otherwise, all of Thorium is there.

I will be adding some more patches, fixing 2 flags, and reviewing all my commits over the last month before making final public builds for all the platforms. So, I'm not going to write the full release notes with all the changes and fixes until then.

Known Issues:

1. Th24 has some minor layout irregularities, but it's 90% working properly.
2. Restore Download Shelf (i.e. remove Download Bubble) flag is not working, and causes crash.
3. Setting notification permission prompts ( chrome://settings/content/notifications ) to anything than what I set it to (quiet and unobtrusive) will cause renderer processes crash. The app will appear normal, but in the background, hundreds of processes are spawned and crash immediately. Suggestion: DONT mess with notification settings until I fix it.
4. Opening settings page can sometimes cause crash. I know what this is, other things just are taking priority over fixing that right now.

😸 Thank you everyone, that is all, wait for full release with full release notes before end of year!

Windows build here > https://github.com/Alex313031/Thorium-Win/releases/tag/M138Beta1

      – Alex313031

M130.0.6723.174 - 62nd Release

M130

This release took a long time (3+ months!) to get out because of a new full time job, and the fact that Windows builds are still crashing. Windows builds are still delayed until I can figure it out. Might need to procure the help of some upstream Chromium devs that are nice enough to help me for free. Me and @midzer decided it would be a good idea to go ahead and release the Linux builds, which are working perfectly, even though we can't release for other platforms yet. UPDATE: Good news, I finally fixed the Windows crash, and MacOS builds are working again! So get ready for M130 for all the other platforms within the next day!

This is one of the complaints from the community that has always been valid, I am one man doing 95% of the coding work, so I can't keep it as up to date as a whole team or corporation can (@gz83 and @midzer occasionally help with coding, but mostly just make Windows and MacOS builds, and help with maintenance tasks).

If you are very concerned about Thorium not always being on the latest Chromium, then perhaps use another browser, or only use Thorium for specific tasks like JPEG-XL or viewing FTP sites. I use it all day, everyday, for work and pleasure, on all my various computers/old phones, since 2021 when I started the project. I've never gotten hacked, or gotten malware. That isn't to say that some zero-day, that they may have patched in a minor revision that Thorium hasn't been updated to yet, couldn't leave Thorium more vulnerable than Google Chrome for instance. It is just that usually, it would have to be a targeted attack, and running this build based on Chromium M130, rather than M132 (the latest), isn't going to turn your computer into some sort of virus magnet all of a sudden. Basically all I am saying is that the complaints and reasoning are very valid, but perhaps some of ya'll are getting a little too afraid and/or heated about it. (People getting mad at me on Reddit, or spamming my email with links to new zero days that have been found in Chromium).

---

New explainer document (with pictures!) about Cr23 and Th24 UI stuff: >> TH24.md

More Th24 fixes/updates include:

• More Chrome Labs items like "Middle Click Scroll"
• Tab Search button alignment is fixed. On Linux/MacOS it is also restored to the original rounded shape. On Windows, it is restored to the old style of being a window control button, like the minimize/maximize/close buttons.
• Colors are Restored! I originally didn't want to do this, but it turned out to be relatively easy. The old, non Cr23 colors had more contrast, and were more neutral so they blended better with different OSes styling. In addition, the "Customize Thorium" side panel now has the old color options on top of the existing new ones. See explainer document for pictures.
• Top bar icon sizes were slightly increased, to make them look better with the old UI.
• Omnibox suggestion row button radius was fixed
• Downloads page (chrome://downloads/) duplicate close button on previously downloaded items was fixed.
• Toggle button styling were restored. See explainer document for pictures.
• Dialog box sizing was restored. See explainer document for pictures.
• Sharing hub button was restored on the right side of the omnibox, where the bookmark button is, along with the original icon.
• Bookmarks folder icon restored for Linux now too (originally I just restored the Windows one).
• Bookmarks bar overflow button and "All Bookmarks" button alignment fixed.
• Omnibox left-hand-side separator is restored, as well as the color of the icon.
• Original new tab button and tab search button icons restored
• Unmaximized window frame grab handle height fixed in Th24
• Menu arrows restored to pre-Cr23 icons.

---

• Global Privacy Control patch added! This makes Thorium one of the few Chromium based browsers to have it. Cromite and Brave have it, but I'm not aware of any others. You can test that it is working in Thorium by visiting https://global-privacy-control.glitch.me/. The setting is a toggle right below the "Do Not Track" toggle. Both are enabled by default in Thorium for the obvious privacy benefits. You can read more about it and toggle it on and off at chrome://settings/cookies.
• When the chrome://flags#rectangular-tabs I added in M128 is enabled, now the new tab button and tab search button will also have a rectangular appearance as well.
• New command line flag --reader-mode to start Thorium with reader mode turned on for all sites.
• Menu show delay time for menus and items was turned down to 0 milliseconds for all platforms. I hate artificial delays added to the UI of applications just to make it match the OS. Heck, I don't like it on the OS either, so I tweak the registry on Windows, or make a GNOME config on Ubuntu to do the same thing but for the whole OS.
• New file handler icons for Windows & MacOS. I might add some for Linux next release too.
• New menu items when right clicking a video
• Hardware acceleration issues with AMD GPUs on Linux fixed by reverting a status flag I had modified back to the way upstream Chromium had it.
• Bookmark bar separator colors fixed.
• Bug where the disable-thorium-icons flag was not working for the home button is fixed.
• Fixed fullscreen mode of the Dino game (called "Arcade Mode") at chrome://dino/. This is actually an upstream bug, so it is broken in Chrome/Chromium still as well! I also made a pull request upstream with the fix, but noone has looked at it yet. So for now Thorium is the only Chromium based browser with a working Arcade Mode of the dino game. So make sure when you are slacking off at work, you choose Thorium for jumping over stuff with a T-Rex! When my fix is (hopefully) accepted upstream, I will let ya'll know lol. The commit that broke it is Here for anyone interested.
• Text contrast increased for better readability in dark mode.
• Side panel grab handle size reduced because it's simply too big.
• Building for a given SIMD level is much easier now, for example an AVX2 or AVX512 or custom build. I did a major code refactor for the compiler optimizations of Thorium, and it can now be controlled through build args rather than source code. See Here for more info. (Only of interest to those building it for themselves).
• New debugging tool for USERS (not just devs). Backstory: Chromium/Thorium can be built with is_debug = true, but these builds are large, very slow, and not suitable for public release. They are normally only used internally by me and the builders @midzer and @gz83 , but they have one thing I wished I had by default: Verbose Logging. Well, now we do, even in non-debug builds! Set the new environment variable THORIUM_DEBUG=1 (or THORIUM_DEBUG=true) (for info on how to set an environment variables, see Here), and when running Thorium from the command line, it will respect them, and cause it to log to console with the same verbosity as a debug build normally would. This means it will show verbose info, non fatal errors and warnings (normally only fatal errors and certain warnings are shown). It will also show any output from the devtools console of the current tab, even if devtools isn't open! Basically this will let you gather a verbose log to send to me in a GitHub issue if I ask for it or if you already know that it's relevant to the bug at hand. It could also be useful for web devs since they can view the devtools console output without it being open.
• Security on Linux improved slightly by disallowing loading .so libraries from anywhere outside the directory the thorium binary resides in, or system library directories.
• Downloads bubble menu width increased to allow long filenames to be read easier.
• Close confirmation flag fixed.

I have also added a new flag to the Chrome Labs i.e. Thorium Experiments button (as well as the chrome://flags page of course), that controls a new feature that may become default in a later release. I am particularly proud of this new feature code-wise, as it was not easy to implement like one would think. Anyway, it is a new top bar button! Enabling chrome://flags#restore-tab-button will add a new little separator and button to the left side of the top bar, beside the home button (or reload button, if you have the home button turned off). Clicking it simply opens the last closed tab or window. Successive presses will open the 2nd last closed tab/window, etc. similar to Ctrl + Shift + T, just with a button instead of a keyboard shortcut for people who like to use their mouse.

Note: If you have turned on the "Disable Download Bubble" flag, you will need to turn it on again because the name and internal variable (which is why you have to set it again) has been changed to "Restore Download Shelf" & chrome://flags#download-shelf

Note 2: If you have any extensions that use /etc/chromium/native-messaging-hosts or similar, you will need to copy them over to /etc/thorium/native-messaging-hosts. Technically, Thorium should have been using this the whole time, just like how Chrome uses /etc/opt/chrome/native-messaging-hosts and Brave uses /etc/brave/native-messaging-hosts. This was a bugfix, but means people who have gotten their extensions to work by just putting them in the Chromium native-messaging-hosts folder will now have to do it for Thorium too. But...

M128.0.6613.189 - 61st 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.

---

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
• "About Thorium" item in the main menu is now in a better place and doesn't have a blue "i" icon on it anymore.
• 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.

TEST build. Chromium + Th24 M128.0.6613.170

M128.0.6613.170

• More Th24 fixes, this is the final version that will ship in the M128 release.
• Made this just as a test build for Th24, and figured I would release it while I'm working on the other M128 stuff.
• This is just regular Chromium, but with Th24 and Thorium's build args
• This release is going to count on my Patreon as this months Linux release, since I need some money lol. When M128 it released the first week of october, there will be a link in my patreon, but It wont be a paid link.

BETA 2 "Th24" build - M126.0.6478.251

IMPORTANT: Please see release notes of previous beta (Beta 1) release, otherwise you will be lost with these notes.

(FYI, when I say "restored", I mean restored to the pre-CR23 UI state).

• Downloads page "X" button fixed
• Minor sizing issues fixed
• Added a new item to the tabstrip right click menu: "New tab to the left" to compliment the default which is "New tab to the right". IDK why they didn't do this upstream, it makes sense, because sometimes you may want to open a tab to the left.
• Number of bookmarks you can open before it prompts "Are you sure you want to open XXX tabs?" was upped from 15 to 50. (Personal pet peeve of mine)
• Theme is "Classic" by default, instead of "Mica" (On Windows), or GTK/QT on Linux. This is to provide a consistent experience as well as prevent an issue where tab separators would be practically invisible. Of course you can still change it to one of those others, and if you have a theme installed, it will not overwrite that.
• Bookmarks bar size adjusted
• InfoBar size restored
• Dialog box/find box/page info box radius restored
• Bug where one could not select a tab if you were not "centered" on the tab, i.e. if you just moved your cursor to the top of the screen above the tab you were trying to select, was fixed after a long debugging session and FaceTime call with @midzer lol. Fixes #804, and partially fixes #640
• Button radius restored (but only for non-WebUI layers, i.e. "native" buttons, so for example, the buttons on the settings page are still bad, while ones on a dialog box for an OS function like printing is restored)
• Volume icon corrected
• Added thorium_2024.h header file to the .patch file so that it would actually work for people wanting to build it for themselves.
• Minor revision updated to .251, which has two security fixes for WebAssembly

TODO: Fix menu padding on Windows, bookmarks bar underline, and folder icons (Note to self: Use .png of 128x128 instead of .icon vector format)

M127 coming soon, which will have a mostly final version of Th24.

BETA 1 "Th24" build - M126.0.6478.246

– 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.
• Minor revision updated to .246, 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 > Downloads Page, WebUI mangling, omnibox icons, 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 .appimage or .zip if you don't want to touch your main installation. Also includes another build of Thorium UI Debug Shell, mostly for our own usage, but also because I haven't made a build in a long time and just for the curious of you out there that wanna play with it.

M126.0.6478.231 - 60th 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.
• 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 #743, #740, #449, #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 - 59th 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.

NOTE: Ubuntu 24.04 and Debian Sid are having issues with Chromium based stuff (including Electron), due to the sandbox (the chrome-sandbox binary). The .deb and .rpm should work, however, you will probably get a crash if you are using the portable .zip or .appimage on these OS versions. A workaround is to use the --no-sandbox flag, but this decreases security. See other potential workarounds Here. There is active work to fix this on the Ubuntu bug tracker. > https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/apparmor/+bug/2046844

M123.0.6312.134 - 32 Bit SSE3 Linux Release

Fixes #659

• 32 Bit Linux build
• Update minor Chromium version to .134