Thorium Browser

[mikkh]

A few minor niggles with Chrome had me searching for alternatives, which is not easy because I also wanted the ability to login to Google to get access to my bookmarks.

Most Chrome alternatives don't let you do that, but Thorium does. Opera once claimed to be the fastest browser on Earth and now Thorium also makes this rather bold claim.

It certainly seems faster thanks to optimisations for more modern CPU's that Chrome lacks, but don't worry you'd have to have a really ancient PC not to benefit from this.

It also has uBlock origin (adblocker) built in, which seems fine and blocks YouTube annoying ads.

My Google account browser settings also included Adblock Plus which it did bring back as part of my signing in to Google, but I thought what's the point of having two installed and deleted that from extensions.

uBlock seems fine so far and also solves my growing discontent with Adblock Plus which has too many 'acceptable ads' they let through. So a double bonus for me, new browser, new adblocker.

Early days, certainly far too early to wholly recommend it, but it's looking good so far and will probably become my default browser.

[mikkh]

A week later, no showstopper bugs found but I've turned off all the featured Thorium experiments as not applicable to me.

There is some concern from the ultra cautious/paranoid in the security fraternity that because other extensions can't be switched off or disabled, that is a possible problem.

I'm no expert in that field and it was just one negative review I found, but all variations of Chromium (Opera,Edge,Chrome,Brave,Vivaldi etc) are adapted/customised in some way.

It's definitely faster than Chrome and would be a good option for people with older hardware who are starting to notice slower browsing.

[mikkh]

A month in, I see no reason to revert to Chrome. It is slightly behind in versions - Chrome currently on build 124 and Thorium is on 123 with an update likely in the next week or so.

uBlock Origin continues to impress, not only does it block annoying YouTube ads, it also kills all ads on my favourite football streaming site. Previously (with adblock plus) there was a 30 second countdown, then 2-5 redirects before you got to actually see the match. Now it's just one click and in.

One of the minor annoyances/bugs with Chrome was hyperlinks not working on distrowatch.com. Over zealous security measure possibly, but I checked the settings and couldn't find a way to disable it.
Obviously with Thorium (or any other browser but Chrome) that isn't a problem, so bug seems more likely.

Always good to have an extra browser or two installed to double check any possible problems, so Thorium should be on your list, along with Opera for it's free VPN and Firefox as the only mainstream browser not based on the open source Chromium.

[mikkh]

Four months in and you could say I might be keeping it now!

The lack of updates is starting to be a bit of a worry though. I did get the build 124 I was expecting, but Chrome has since moved on to build 127 and I'm still waiting for build 125 on Thorium.

Not a major problem unless it signals the end of development for Thorium and hopefully that isn't the case.

Watch this space for exciting (or otherwise) news.

[elvis]

Interesting, Mikhh, and I will 'Watch this space for exciting (or otherwise) news'.

[mikkh]

All good things come to he who waits, build 126 became available today. No idea what happened to 125, but I'm happy to see it's still an ongoing thing.