Security
- Updated to Chromium 152.0.7977.64, which brings upstream's latest security
fixes.
A look of its own
- Aerium now uses its own colours instead of picking them up from your phone's
wallpaper, so it looks like Aerium on every device. - Dark mode reaches two places it was missing before: Incognito, and the
toolbar on the fast "warm start" path. Both used to stay grey while the rest
of the browser went black.
Dark mode on web pages
- Settings → Appearance → Theme → Darken websites now gives true black on
every page. Pages with a plain white background already went black; pages
with any tint kept a grey cast, and no longer do. - A new switch beside it, off by default: Blacken dark sites extends the
same treatment to sites that ship their own dark theme. YouTube and Reddit
are the obvious ones — their dark grey still lights every pixel on an OLED
screen. - Changing either switch now offers to restart the browser. They only take
effect on a restart, and previously nothing said so, which made them look
broken.
Deleting what you leave behind
- New: Settings › Privacy and security › Delete browsing data on exit. Pick
which of the eight data types go when you close the browser — history,
downloads, cookies, cache, form data, passwords, site settings, hosted app
data. Off by default; passwords and site settings stay unticked even once it
is on, because a switch that promises a clean slate should not quietly throw
away your sign-ins unless you asked it to. - If Android closes the browser without warning, the deletion happens the next
time it starts instead, before you do anything with it. Closing it yourself
deletes straight away.
Seeing what you are running
- New: chrome://aerium lists every change this build makes on top of
upstream Chromium — GrapheneOS's Vanadium patches first, then Aerium's own,
with the number of files each one edits. The list is generated while the
build runs from the patches and scripts themselves, so it describes what was
actually applied rather than what someone remembered to write down. - The About screen now links to it, and to the project's own site.
Dark mode fix
- Blacken dark sites is greyed out while Darken websites is off, with a
line saying which box to tick first. It only changes how darkened pages are
painted, so with darkening off it did nothing at all and said so nowhere.
Media keeps playing
- Video and audio no longer stop when you leave the browser or the screen turns
off. Chromium suspends media in a hidden page on Android; Aerium doesn't.
Anything with sound keeps going — a muted video still pauses, since nobody is
listening to it and running it would cost battery for a picture you can't see. - Sites that stop their own video when you look away now keep playing as well.
YouTube is the one everyone runs into: the page is told it went to the
background and pauses itself, which no browser setting could undo. Aerium
lets a page that is making sound go on believing it is still on screen, so
it never reaches for the pause button. This only applies while sound is
actually playing — a silent background tab is told the plain truth and is
slowed down and put to sleep exactly as before, so nothing here costs you
battery. No extension to install, and nothing a site can see.
Smaller download
- About 20 MB lighter. Chromium packs in Android XR and ARCore libraries by
default; Aerium has those features switched off and now leaves the libraries
out too.
Full Changelog: v152.0.7977.54...v152.0.7977.64