First, to address the easter egg and website stuff, here is my explanation/apology post > https://alex313031.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-good-bad-and-ugly.html (it also addresses why I was gone for a month).
M119 (Y'all can finally update from M116)
- Fixes multiple CVEs including GHSA-xm5p-7w7v-qqr5
- Better HLS support
- Better JavaScript compilation performance due to new Thorium compiler flags as well as upstream V8 re-workings.
- Updated Widevine versions
- The search engine choices that Thorium adds are now available in more locales. (Notably not in Russia or China because ya know, their governments not allowing certain URLs. Hong Kong and Ukraine are not affected).
- Live Caption should now finally work (English only, sorry. The .grdp files for other languages are closed source for now).
- ChromeCast can now use VP8 and VP9 codecs for less bandwidth consumption if you have slower internet. (Note that this is disabled by default in Chromium, I enabled it, but it is still experimental).
- New chrome://flags flag
chrome://flags#disable-aero
This disables transparency effects and GPU accelerated window frame compositing (while still leaving GPU acceleration for the actual web contents intact). It is useful if you dislike transparency, or are getting glitches on Windows 11 with the window frame. - Storage Access API was disabled because the security risk is more than the usability improvement. If you need this, use the new
chrome://flags/#storage-access-api
flag I added to enable it. - Keyboard shortcuts in ThoriumOS now align better with Linux.
- Portable version now also sets the cache dir to ./.config/cache, to prevent any disk writes outside of the dir.
- Rejoice! If you are like me and hate the new "Download bubble" and want the old "Download shelf" back, well I reverted a commit from upstream, and now there is a flag for it! >
chrome://flags#download-bubble
- Windows builds are now more hardened against memory overflows by enabling the arg "win_enable_cfg_guards = true"
- PGO is now more effective (thanks @RobRich999) > Alex313031/thorium@5fe3937
- New flag from Ungoogled-Chromium
chrome://flags#tab-hover-cards
Allows removing tab hover card images, and instead replace with a tooltip (the behavior before M106). - NOTE: On MacOS, we had to disable the 'disable_fieldtrial_testing_config = true' arg, so unfortunately this build will still fetch field trials (AKA "variations", Google's way of testing experiments on a small subset of users before releasing more broadly. Thorium normally has this disabled so that everything is reproducible and people don't report bugs that are caused by Google's end instead of mine). It was disabled following testing by @midzer showing a performance regression.
This is Thorium 119 ARM64 on a Macbook Pro with M3 CPU. As far as we know, this is the first time a browser has scored more than 600 points on Speedometer 2.1!