A cross-platform Chromium fork named after radioactive element No. 90
- Targets Chromium stable releases while retaining Thorium's own patches, branding, and defaults.
- Intended to remain familiar to Chrome and Chromium users while exposing additional controls and restoring useful behavior.
- Release builds use compiler and linker optimizations including ThinLTO, PGO, and architecture-aware SIMD profiles. 💥 x86 build configurations are available for SSE2, SSE3, SSE4.1, SSE4.2, AVX, AVX2, and AVX-512. SSE2 is primarily a 32-bit Windows compatibility profile; standard desktop x64 builds use AVX, while explicitly named AVX2 and AVX-512 builds target newer processors. macOS, ARM, and Android builds use their platform-specific configurations instead. Release availability varies by platform and CPU profile. If you are unsure which one to download, see the release and SIMD variant guide.
This repository contains the shared source and Linux releases. Separate platform repositories distribute additional binaries:
- Linux: Thorium releases
- Windows: Thorium Win
- Windows on ARM: Thorium WOA
- macOS for Apple silicon and Intel x64: Thorium MacOS
- Android ARM32 and ARM64: Thorium Android
- Raspberry Pi ARM64: Thorium Raspi
- ChromiumOS-based releases: ThoriumOS
- Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, and 8.1: Thorium Legacy
- Linux DEB repository and project website: thorium.rocks
Choose a build that matches your CPU. A binary compiled for an unsupported SIMD profile may fail before the browser starts. See the release and SIMD variant guide before selecting a compatibility or optimized build.
- Uses
thorium://as the user-facing alias for internal pages while retaining canonicalchrome://compatibility. This includes desktop and Android address-bar surfaces. - Provides the optional Thorium 2024 UI with translucent inactive tabs, plus classic Omnibox and bookmark styling, rectangular tabs, custom tab widths, expanded theme colors, and platform menu controls. See the Thorium 2024 UI explainer.
- Adds extensive tab controls: left- or right-aligned Tab Search, Pin/Unpin Tab Search, Restore Tab, Ctrl+Tab MRU, scrollable tabs, hover activation, custom close-button behavior, double-click/right-click tab closing, and "New tab to the left".
- Restores the classic Download Shelf behind
thorium://flags/#download-shelf, enhances the downloads page, enables parallel downloading by default, and provides additional download notifications and controls. - Adds close confirmation, close-window-with-last-tab, background-mode, quiet-notification, custom New Tab Page, auto-dark-mode, theme, avatar-button, extension-menu, and tab-hover-card controls.
- Restores FTP URL handling and permits saving supported pages from additional schemes.
- Extends media support with FFmpeg HEVC/H.265, MPEG-2, AC-3/E-AC-3, WebRTC H.265 modes, platform media switches, and VAAPI/libva configuration.
- Provides Widevine integration where a supported bundled payload or external CDM is available and redistribution is permitted. Platform details and patch ownership are documented in PATCHES.md.
- Adds and enables Global Privacy Control, disables Privacy Sandbox defaults, reduces DoH request headers, and offers controls for encrypted ClientHello, history retention, and clearing data on exit.
- Prevents URL elision by default, provides Thorium search-engine data and branded search icons, and keeps the local New Tab Page behavior configured by Thorium defaults.
- Disables unwanted startup/default-browser warnings, feature promos, AI entry points, alternate error pages, and remote field-trial fetching by default.
- Preinstalls classic uBlock Origin when Chromium's preinstall provider processes a new supported profile. Existing profiles are not force-backfilled, and uninstalling it prevents automatic reinstallation.
- Keeps pending extension downloads and user-requested updates working, but disables automatic updates of installed extensions by default. Automatic updates can be restored through
thorium://flags/#enable-extension-autoupdate. - Includes Manifest V2 support, increased declarative-net-request limits, a quick extension toggle menu, extension keyboard shortcuts, and controls for Chrome Web Store management APIs.
- Includes experimental desktop-style extension support on Android and an option to enable extensions in Incognito.
- Includes Thorium-branded Windows mini-installer UI, Linux DEB/RPM packaging and desktop integration, ChromeDriver, and
thorium_shellpackaging where supported. - Includes
pak, a cross-platform utility for packing and unpacking Chromium *.pak resources.
- Applies build, compiler, UI, privacy, media, installer, and platform patches through the audited order in
patch_scripts/series/series.
+ Additional patches and useful thorium://flags entries are too numerous to list here.
- For ownership and implementation details, read PATCHES.md. The active patch order is maintained in
patch_scripts/series/series. - Report and track current bugs in the Thorium issue tracker.
- A list of Chromium command line flags can be found at > https://peter.sh/experiments/chromium-command-line-switches
See BUILDING.md.
See infra/DEBUG.
− 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 ThoriumOS with Thorium, codecs, Widevine, linux-firmware/modules, and extra packages at > https://github.com/Alex313031/ThoriumOS/
− Project lead: @Alex313031 https://github.com/Alex313031/
− Thanks to https://github.com/midzer/ for support and helping with builds.
− Thanks to https://github.com/gz83/ for support and helping with builds.
− Thanks to https://github.com/robrich999/ for some info and fixes that went into this project.
− Also thanks to https://github.com/bromite/bromite, https://github.com/uazo/cromite, 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 Rust PAK utility source and the prebuilt binaries in pak_src/binaries are credited to @myfreeer: https://github.com/myfreeer/chrome-pak-customizer/
Thanks for using Thorium!