Thorium: The Fastest Open Source Chromium-based Browser? (itsfoss.com) 55
"After taking a look at Floorp Browser, I was left wondering whether there was a Chromium-based web browser that was as good, or even better than Chrome," writes a "First Look" reviewer at It's Foss News.
"That is when I came across Thorium, a web-browser that claims to be the 'the fastest browser on Earth'." [Thorium] is backed by a myriad of tweaks that include, compiler optimizations for SSE4.2, AVS, AES, various mods to CFLAGS, LDFLAGS, thinLTO flags, and more. The developer shares performance stats using popular benchmarking tools... I tested it using Speedometer 3.0 benchmark on Fedora 39 and compared it to Brave, and the scores were:
Thorium: 19.2; Brave: 19.5
So, it may not be the "fastest" always, probably one of the fastest, that comes close to Brave or sometimes even beats it (depends on the version you tested it and your system).
Alexander Frick, the lead developer, also insists on providing support for older operating systems such as Windows 7 so that its user base can use a capable modern browser without much fuss... As Thorium is a cross-platform web browser, you can find packages for a wide range of platforms such as Linux, Raspberry Pi, Windows, Android, macOS, and more.
Thorium can sync to your Google account to import your bookmarks, extensions, and themes, according to the article.
"Overall, I can confidently say that it is a web browser I could daily drive, if I were to ditch Chrome completely. It gels in quite well with the Google ecosystem and has a familiar user interface that doesn't get in the way."
"That is when I came across Thorium, a web-browser that claims to be the 'the fastest browser on Earth'." [Thorium] is backed by a myriad of tweaks that include, compiler optimizations for SSE4.2, AVS, AES, various mods to CFLAGS, LDFLAGS, thinLTO flags, and more. The developer shares performance stats using popular benchmarking tools... I tested it using Speedometer 3.0 benchmark on Fedora 39 and compared it to Brave, and the scores were:
Thorium: 19.2; Brave: 19.5
So, it may not be the "fastest" always, probably one of the fastest, that comes close to Brave or sometimes even beats it (depends on the version you tested it and your system).
Alexander Frick, the lead developer, also insists on providing support for older operating systems such as Windows 7 so that its user base can use a capable modern browser without much fuss... As Thorium is a cross-platform web browser, you can find packages for a wide range of platforms such as Linux, Raspberry Pi, Windows, Android, macOS, and more.
Thorium can sync to your Google account to import your bookmarks, extensions, and themes, according to the article.
"Overall, I can confidently say that it is a web browser I could daily drive, if I were to ditch Chrome completely. It gels in quite well with the Google ecosystem and has a familiar user interface that doesn't get in the way."
Why should I care? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why should I care? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why should I care? (Score:5, Informative)
For me it's not so much seeing ads as the tracking, the performance load, and the battery load that the ads bring.
Let's not forget about being forced to spend some amount of your data plan for the "privilege" of downloading and viewing the ads... and that several of those ads will install malware, nagware, scareware, etc., if you miss the "close/dismiss" button. Of course, when you complain to the websites about it, they will say that they get all of their ads from RandomAdNetwork... and if you ask RandomAdNetwork, they'll tell you that they're just a distributor and aren't responsible. So basically, until someone tells me where I can point the finger of blame when these ads do nasty stuff to my phone, tablet, or computer, I will use whatever ad blockers I please, and if I can't read whatever site it is because they won't allow ad blocker usage, well, I guess I'll go elsewhere.
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Unfortunately Firefox for Android is a battery killer. Even with uBlock, it consumes at least 10x as much energy as Chrome does.
The most efficient option is Chrome and DNS66, but it doesn't block ads as well as uBlock does.
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Actually I live on my own in an apartment with a view of the ocean from my front doorstep in Manhattan Beach, and I pay all of my mom's bills even though she lives about 450 miles away, nor do I use a macbook when I can avoid doing so, but if believing that is what helps you feel a sense of adequacy so you can maintain your sanity then well...I'll let you get right to it; the world already has too many nutters as it is.
Re: Why should I care? (Score:1)
Your little video screed in your sig is straight from a Milton Friedman right-wing propaganda mill.
Re: Why should I care? (Score:3)
Regardless of whether it's a fallacy, none of the points in the video withstand scrutiny.
Re: Why should I care? (Score:2)
Examples?
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Great point, mod this up please
only first worlders could say something like performance doesn't matter cause modern computers are so fast
of course, in the rest of the world, performance matters most
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At one point, like 2 decades ago, it would have been to write "First" in response to this article.
Does Thorium pay? (Score:1)
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No, the effect if more like what happens over time when exposed to the radioactive element thorium.
Fast is nice and all (Score:5, Interesting)
But I also like the browser to not swallow up all the RAM.
Pale Moon might be slower, especially on this old laptop, but it's fast enough to do what it should do and and limits itself to 2GB of RAM.
I consider that lightweight nowadays.
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Too bad they don't seem to have a single convenient setting for "Use 4GB max" or similar.
Does stuff like ulimit work suitably? Or is the browser unaware of it's ulimit, and just sees the max free RAM and thus becomes even more likely to run out of memory.
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I could run it in a VM, but then I'd lose a chunk of RAM to the VM.
Not very handy while limited to 4GB.
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I use palemoon as well, but all the freaking ghost windows (memory leaks) are starting to get annoying. It used to be that a few websites didn't work correctly, and you avoided them or simply blocked a script that was causing it, but now going to github, or finance.yahoo.com, etc. get ghost windows. After having ghost windows for a certain amount of time, you start getting annoying sluggish issues, where the CPU is ramping up trying to clear these memory leaks, but it can't until you eventually restart pa
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It has all gone to hell a while ago if you ask me, it doesn't matter what browser you use, it will eventually eat all your memory and become sluggish after 24 hours so you need to constantly or at least often restart the browser. Worse, more and more sites simply won't render properly if you use any non-mainstream browser. Slashdot is fine although and low footprint on hardware.
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>it doesn't matter what browser you use, it will eventually eat all your memory and become sluggish after 24 hours so you need to constantly or at least often restart the browser
That hasn't been my experience, ever, using Firefox under Linux on my desktop for countless years. I have it running for weeks or months, continuously, with several windows each having dozens of tabs. This machine has 32GB of RAM and almost always 20GB+ available, and that is while it is also running LibreOffice, Pidgin, Audaci
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Sites are becoming more heavy by the year, yes, but I can leave Pale Moon open for weeks on end with a few sites open and a bunch which automatically unload (but not close) thanks to an extension.
Even with another window open with lots of active tabs, I had no problems keeping it open for weeks until I needed a restart for updates. I'm quite pleased with how stable this browser is.
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Props to a fellow Pale Moon user. I hate how much people dump all over this browser.
Speed is nice and all, but you just can't dismiss the importance of trust. Every time I update Firefox, I wonder to myself, "What did they break this time?" Every time I've updated Pale Moon, it just works with no surprises. At this point, after so many years of using it, it's the only application I update with no hesitation.
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It didn't have an easy update path when I last used it. Have they improved that?
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I stopped using Pale Moon because it stopped successfully loading newer sites.
Otherwise I have nothing bad to say about it, but compatibility remains a deal breaker. I can't remember the last time I had to load up Chromium because something wouldn't work in Firefox.
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I had to use Firefox for several sites because of incompatibility with their non-web standard changes, but haven't needed to since several Pale Moon updates ago.
They are aware of what Google does to wall off the internet.
It's in the settings (Score:2)
The Floorp settings, under General / Performance, allows you to choose between memory and performance (3 settings: minimum memory usage, balanced, best performance).
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That would be a good settings option for every browser.
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But I also like the browser to not swallow up all the RAM.
Why? What is the benefit of not using your hardware and instead having to wait for things to load or get pulled from disk cache?
Use all my RAM please, that's why I bought it, to speed up everything.
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The benefit is that it leaves RAM for all the other programs I'm running.
When I run Firefox with a few sites open it slows everything down to a crawl because of swapping, and I can't upgrade to more than the 4GB the laptop has.
Great, the return of the browser wars (Score:2, Funny)
We'll also be ordering appetizers for everyone;
what about the vi vs emacs salad?
Why (Score:1)
Open-Source is good. but why do I need a Chromium based browser?
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>"Open-Source is good. but why do I need a Chromium based browser?"
You don't.
And there are big differences in "Open Source." Chromium is "Open Source" and yet it is NOT community-driven. It is completely controlled by Google to meet their objectives. And, thus, the most important part of ANY Chromium-based browser ("chrom*") directly supports Google's power, objectives, and control. It doesn't matter what UI is placed on it- the development world sees it as one browser.
Firefox (and its derivatives) i
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Firefox is to browsers as Joe Biden is to presidential candidates.
To wit, and in specific, power consumption on mobile is offensive and the UI situation on all platforms is distressing. Oddly it is least terrible on mobile, where there is the most configurability.
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"Firefox is to browsers as Joe Biden is to presidential candidates."
A perfect way to put it. Not what we really want, but far better than the alternative.
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>"power consumption on mobile is offensive"
I very rarely use a phone for browsing, so I don't know on that. Not saying it isn't important, just not for me.
>"and the UI situation on all platforms is distressing."
It is no worse than Chrom/ium and better in many ways.
>Oddly it is least terrible on mobile, where there is the most configurability.
Desktop Firefox has userChrome, which unleashes all kinds of UI tweaking.
pointless (Score:5, Insightful)
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Turning off JavaScript often does wonders to improve performance.
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it's very fast to load sites that don't work due to disabling javascript. i would love to install noscript, but fact is almost every site breaks without javascript nowadays
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Most sites work without JavaScript. Traditonal web design dogma is that if a site doesn't work without JavaScript, it is defective.
Only a few sites don't work without JavaScript. Those also happen to be the sites that draw the most traffic. (No wonder, all that remote code injection must drive traffic through the roof.)
But yes, I've noticed that the number of defective sites keeps increasing. I'm even told that the web interfaces of embedded system require Facebook's React (more like Wrecked TBH). What
How does it compare to lynx? (Score:1)
Or edbrowse?
Is it even as fast as links2 or w3m?
Speed is the goal here, right?
I suppose graphics and CSS support might be important to some people. Is it faster than netsurf?
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Don't be silly. The context here is obviously a full modern graphical web browser, since all the comparisons are to that.
Alternatively, you can't compare links and thorium because they don't do the same thing and don't have the same end goal.
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Netsurf and links2 are graphical web browsers.
Aren't links and Thorium both web browsers? Do they not serve the same MIME type?
Certainly, their goals differ, as links is its own package and not just a set of tweaked build flags for the most resource hungry monster out there.
It's not so much the browser that needs to be fast (Score:5, Insightful)
People writing pages these days don't even bother optimizing images and have 300 divs inside each other for a layout not terribly different from what we had in the 90s. And loads of dependencies like giant CSS and JS files and god knows what. It's nice they have gigabit connections but I would still like to browse the web when I have low signal. Which happens a lot in ye olde Europe when you go inside 500 year old stone buildings.
Do note: I used to work for a startup that targeted developing countries with 10 year old low-end phones etc... with clever use of unicode/emojis instead of images and very tight hand-coded svg I once made a webpage in 16KB. I use lots of image optimization tricks from the old days, like lowering image color depth to 16 bit and whatnot.
De-Googled? (Score:2)
I looked on github and... (Score:2)
Reminder (Score:1)