– So the new UI (goes by various names like Chrome Refresh, Chrome Refresh 2023, often shortened to Cr23 in documents and source code) that Google has made is completely fucked. I almost always bleep out cuss words here with **** but I want to emphasize its fucked-ness lol.)
- Why are tabs half the height? Stupid.
- Why are tab separators and padding doubled, (3px vs 6px) meaning less tabs can fit in the tabstrip for a given window size before they "overflow" and can't be seen? Dumb!
- Why is the bookmarks bar taller than either the address bar or the tabstrip. Makes it look out of balance.
- Why are icons, font size, padding, and separators in menus SO BIG. This looks ugly, and I have already gotten issues on github about them being so big that people on smaller screens right click on something, and then they have to SCROLL just to get to what they want. Menus should not have a scrollbar on the side because the content is so big it can't fit. Bad user experience.
- Why is the separator between all the top bar content, and the webpage's frame, rounded at the corners? Similarly, why are all buttons super rounded, even to the point where I have seen bugs upstream about the button's text being clipped out of view. Unneeded and dumb.
- Why does the Downloads page (i.e. chrome://downloads) require a menu press and then a second button press to remove an item. It used to just be an "X". This makes clearing out your downloads manually (instead of "Clear All", which often we don't want), take FOREVER.
- Why are WebUI pages all of a sudden "mangled" on the javascript side? This makes inspection and debugging VERY DIFFICULT for browser devs like me, and decreases transparency for any end user that just wants to see how the page is layed out. I get minifying the javascript to save space, but why are we mangling it which serves nothing but to obfuscate things?
- Why are omnibox icons so huge that they appear mis-sized for the omnibox height? They were fine as they were.
➕ many, many more complaints and issues from me, Thorium users, and the community at large (just take a look at the Chromium bugs or Google Chrome Help threads and search for "2023" or "Cr23")
Thus, I am starting a UI redesign initiative tentatively called "Th24" (Which is also nice since the browser is named after radioactive element Thorium, one isotope of which happens to have a radiation half-life of 24.0 days lol).
This doesn't attempt to completely revert the Cr23 UI (they have since removed all the pre-Cr23 UI code, which covers hundreds of files. The amount of work to keep it reverted and maintained each release would be ridiculous). Instead, it attempts to come up with new code paths to create a UI that more closely matches the old, non-Cr23 UI, especially for specific problem areas like mentioned above. I'm not gonna touch colors or icons for example.
This is a beta build that is buggy but does solve alot of the above:
- Tab height is restored
- Tab padding is reduced (but not restored, for aesthetic reasons)
- Bookmark bar height is restored
- Menus, their size, and square shape, are all restored (except for menus in the omnibox for some reason?)
- Reduced the rounded-ness of buttons and the separator described in No. 5.
- Minor revision updated to .246, which includes two security fixes for WebAssembly
All of this is not the default!. You will have to go to chrome://flags and enable the new chrome://flags/#thorium-2024 flag.
Future work to be done on > Downloads Page, WebUI mangling, omnibox icons, and the padding between extension icons (when you "pin" an extension to the top bar).
If you would like to integrate these fixes into your own Chromium build, I have decided that instead of adding files to the Thorium src tree, the changes are instead in a git ".patch" file that can be applied separately to vanilla Chromium (Kinda like the .patch files in the thorium-libjxl repo that serve the same purpose for JPEG-XL support). Just make sure the version of Chromium matches or is very close to the one Thorium is currently on. See > https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium/blob/main/other/thorium-2024-ui.patch
SSE4 builds only. You can use the .appimage or .zip if you don't want to touch your main installation. Also includes another build of Thorium UI Debug Shell, mostly for our own usage, but also because I haven't made a build in a long time and just for the curious of you out there that wanna play with it.