Thorium Browser, Thorium OS

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a new chromium fork and also a chrome os fork well maintained with some patches mainly ungoogled chrome os and chromium is the main offering here.

GitHub - Alex313031/Thorium-Win: Chromium fork for Windows named after radioactive element No. 90; Windows builds of https://github.com/Alex313031/Thorium (for windows)
also mercury which is a firefox fork
Mercury Browser
GitHub - Alex313031/Mercury: Firefox fork with compiler optimizations and patches from Librewolf, Waterfox, and GNU IceCat.

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Should this can be included in the browser recommendation.

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Absolutely not. It’s a good tweaked chomium/ChromiumOS, but it isn’t more privacy-friendly than the other options we have listed there. It’s still better than just your average spying web browser, but not by a whole lot.

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but can be mentioned

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Why?

Mercury doesn’t even deliver on its performance claims: Benchmarking Mercury As The "Fastest Firefox Fork" With AVX, AES, LTO + PGO - Phoronix

Thorium isn’t even up to date right now:

Mercury also changes things that it shouldn’t, like the User Agent which both breaks compatibility and introduces privacy concerns.

Librewolf and my Mull both have a far longer track record and set the bar high, yet aren’t mentioned.
So why should some random forks be mentioned?

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Why would it be?

Why?

  1. Are you the/a developer for the project?
  2. What is Thorium’s reason for being? What problems does it solve better than existing chromium based and non-chromium based browsers?
  3. Apart from wanting free advertisement, why do you believe it should be Privacy Guide’s short list? (specific reasons please)
  4. In your eyes, Why might someone choose Thorium over the existing Privacy Guides recommendations (Firefox, Brave, Mullvad Browser)?
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Thorium (and Mercury) browser came to my attention via a Youtube video on Chris Titus Tech:
(https://youtu.be/naDYUVFs1-8)
I downloaded both and am using them today to see how they are.
Certainly, they seem fast.
But speed is usually the enemy of security and thus privacy.
The default settings are the standard Chrome/Firefox settings, unlike Ungoogled Chromium/Librewolf.
The list of issues on the Github page seems sizable and Thorium is still on 117; UC is on 118.
I would not put much trust in these just yet, despite the glowing video.

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One week after I posted this, let’s check the state of things again…

wtYQxb5sBaZasifA

Ah, still 117 :cry:

Let’s not use this you guys, regardless of how much YouTubers like it. Marking as rejected

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I understand that you would like it to be on 118… all I needed to do was search the open issues and it appears to be resolved. Am I missing something?

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@gnu

that 117 they’re shipping still has 22 known security issues:

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Yes, I wasn’t saying the WebP vulnerability was the current issue, it was a past example of Thorium patching that issue weeks late by issuing 117 weeks late. Who knows what they’re weeks late behind on this time around?

(Well @SkewedZeppelin knows, 22 known issues so far lol)

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Looks like the dev uploaded furry p*rn and cp to the browser.

https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium/issues/463

https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium/issues/463#issuecomment-1853105618

He deleted the issue.

Archive:

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what! someone dig deep plz.

This ain’t it.

Need confirmation by atleast 10 people, and if the culprit is found guilty, we need to blacklist this forever.

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I mean they’re still on 117.0.5938.157 which means users of it are exposed to 69 known security issues, one of which was a zero-day.

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It was on the browser itself, but also it was on Alex’s website.

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The offending commit seems to be:

commit 14fc2ca3d8af7c15387e71a450bbf0c1a486090c
Author: Alexander David Frick <Alex313031@gmail.com>
Date:   Wed Jul 20 03:14:25 2022 -0700

    Add files via upload

And people wonder why we reject “insert 101 shitty little project that is by some untrustworthy person”.

That’s the thing though, youtubers are having to constantly make new videos about something, there just isn’t that many “new” things worth talking about especially regarding privacy, and then even if it is new, is that even a good thing?

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This is something I wish more people realized generally. Youtubers, bloggers, etc derive revenue from maximizing attention, and consistent attention requires consistently producing new content which draws people in and keeps people watching. For these reasons and others, what youtubers feature and promote will often skew towards (1) new projects over known reputable projects (2) controversies and divisive issues (3) opinions that reflect what their audience wants to hear or believe (4) Topics with a ‘good guy’ / ‘bad guy’ narrative.

That doesn’t mean nothing on Youtube is trustworthy, but we should all be aware of the conscious and unconscious biases that this revenue model creates.

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Despite what a lot of people think it’s not very much they earn even if a big popular channel, as 8 bit guy pointed out in his last video. Without Patreon and other side ventures a lot of these people would have next to nothing.

Progressively it’s got more difficult to make a living from it without being “blah blah blah sponsored by X VPN company”, which is why that spam is so prevalent throughout videos these days. I’m pretty sure LTT said something about requiring a constant stream of videos per week or the algorithm punishes you.

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