Curious on how good this fork of chromium is for privacy. Same person does the Mercury browser too I think
I’ve used Thorium in the past and thought it was decent. But given Google’s updates to the chromium project I’ve moved away from chromium based browsers.
I thought the whole downside of chrome permeated anything chromium and any other subset of it.
I’ve used Thorium (not as my main browser) and I like it. Decent privacy features, performance does feel better.
Some major downsides though:
- It is not frequently updated to the latest Chromium patch; there have been times where Thorium has lagged three major versions behind. And just forget about getting patches that fix major security vulnerabilities until the next major update.
- The browser is heavily opinionated, and while that has resulted in a browser with a half-useable version of the Chrome refresh, see this issue and it’s clear the focus is not on privacy.
If you want a browser that’s more focused on privacy and don’t care about the eye-candy that Thorium provides, the Cromite browser is only doing security + privacy patches, has toggles for more permissions, has V8 disabled by default, allows for automatic clearing of history, allows you to change the default referrer policy, has more chrome://flags, and actually gets updates frequently to the latest patch.
Thorium’s entire focus is on performance. As another commenter has noted, that means no security updates, and no privacy features.
I wouldn’t recommend it for daily use, but if you are playing a browser based game it’s worth testing out. I used to play krunker.io and I tested it to see if I could get more FPS (FPS equaled faster movement speed back then), but I didn’t see any major performance improvements over the major krunker clients or Microsoft Edge (other most performant browser).