The release of the Thorium 110 project has been published, which develops a periodically synchronized fork of the Chromium browser, enhanced with additional patches for performance optimization, user experience improvements, and increased security. According to tests by Thorium developers, it outperforms the standard Chromium by 8-40% mainly due to the inclusion of additional optimizations during compilation. Ready builds are provided for Linux, macOS, Raspberry Pi, and Windows.
Main differences from Chromium:
- Compilation with cycle optimization (LLVM Loop), profile-guided optimizations (PGO), link-time optimizations (LTO), and the application of CPU instructions SSE4.2, AVX, and AES (Chromium uses only SSE3).
- Transfer of additional functionality present in Google Chrome but not available in Chromium builds. For example, the addition of the Widevine module for playback of paid protected content (DRM), inclusion of multimedia codecs, and activation of plugins used in Chrome.
- Added experimental support for the MPEG-DASH adaptive streaming technology.
- Support for the HEVC/H.265 video encoding format is included for Linux and Windows.
- Support for JPEG XL format images is enabled by default.
- Support for automatic subtitles (Live Caption, SODA) is enabled.
- Experimental support for annotations in PDF is added but not enabled by default.
- Patches for Chromium provided by the Debian distribution have been transferred, addressing issues with font rendering, VAAPI, VDPAU, and Intel HD support, ensuring integration with the notification output system.
- VAAPI support is included in Wayland-based environments.
- DNS over HTTPS (DoH) is enabled by default.
- Do Not Track mode is enabled by default to block tracking code.
- The address bar always shows the full URL.
- The FLoC system promoted by Google as an alternative to tracking cookies is disabled.
- Warnings about Google API keys are disabled, but support for API keys for settings synchronization remains.
- The suggestion to use the browser as the default in the system is disabled.
- Search engines DuckDuckGo, Brave Search, Ecosia, Ask.com, and Yandex.com are added.
- Permanent use of only the local page displayed when opening a new tab is enabled.
- The page reload button now includes a context menu with additional reload modes ('Normal Reload', 'Hard Reload', 'Clear Cache and Hard Reload').
- Home and Chrome Labs buttons have been added by default.
- Settings for preloading content have been changed to enhance privacy.
- Patches have been added to the GN build system and sandbox isolation implementation.
- Multi-threaded loading support is enabled by default.
- The pak utility, used for packing and unpacking files in pak format, has been included.
- The .desktop file now includes experimental web platform features and offers additional launch modes: thorium-shell, Safe Mode, and Dark Mode.
Changes in Thorium version 110 include:
- Synchronization with the Chromium 110 codebase has been achieved.
- Support for the JPEG-XL format has been restored.
- Support for the AC3 audio codec has been added.
- Support for all profiles of the HEVC/H.265 codec has been implemented.
- New optimizations for building the V8 engine have been added.
- Experimental features chrome://flags/#force-gpu-mem-available-mb, chrome://flags/#double-click-close-tab, chrome://flags/#show-fps-counter, and chrome://flags/#enable-native-gpu-memory-buffers have been enabled.
- On Linux, a launch mode with a temporary profile has been added (the profile is saved in the /tmp directory and is cleared after a restart).
Additionally, the development of a browser named Mercury by the same author is noteworthy, which conceptually resembles Thorium but is built on Firefox. The browser also includes additional optimizations, utilizes AVX and AES instructions, and carries over many patches from the LibreWolf, Waterfox, FireDragon, PlasmaFox, and GNU IceCat projects, disabling telemetry, reporting, debugging features, and additional services such as Pocket and contextual recommendations. Do Not Track mode is enabled by default, the Backspace key handler (browser.backspace_action) has been restored, and GPU acceleration has been activated. According to developers, Mercury outperforms Firefox by 8-20% in performance. Builds of Mercury based on Firefox 112 are offered for testing, but they are still positioned as alpha versions.
Source: opennet.ru
