May 26, 2024 23:05:00

What is 'Thorium', a project to develop a web browser that is even faster than Chrome using Chromium?

The open source web browser project '

Chromium ', developed and maintained by Google, can be used to create various web browsers such as Microsoft Edge and Opera. Engineer Alexander Frick is developing ' Thorium ', a web browser based on Chromium that is faster than Google's web browser 'Chrome'.

Outline of benefits of Thorium over vanilla Chromium.
https://alex313031.blogspot.com/2022/01/outline-of-benefits-of-thorium-over.html

Thorium Browser

https://thorium.rocks/

The web browser Thorium is named after thorium , the element with atomic number 90. Regarding the development of Thorium, Flick said, 'Chromium is a great project, and we want to create a fork of Chrome that will make people who already use Chromium even happier.'

Thorium enables AVX instructions and AES extended instructions when compiled, to speed up the code on CPUs that support them. In addition, the values of CFlag, LDFlags, import_instr_limit, etc. are changed from the default, and all debug structures are excluded from the binary.

As a result, Thorium is expected to provide an 8-38% performance improvement over the default Chromium, which scored 71.9 points in a Speedometer comparison.

On the other hand, Thorium scored 106 points, which is a 38% improvement over the default Chromium.

In a benchmark comparison using Octane, Chromium scored 28,394 points.

Under similar conditions, Thorimu's score was 31,108 points, a 9% improvement.

Even in a comparison using JetStream 2, the default Chromium scored 95.869 points.

Thorium scored 104.823 points, a score improvement of approximately 8.9%.

In addition, Flick ran a Speedometer 2.1 test on

a MacBook Pro with an M3 and Thorium scored 609 points, saying, 'I've never seen a web browser score over 600.'

To improve performance, Thorium supports

MPEG-DASH , the video compression standard H.265 , always opens new tabs locally regardless of search engine, and disables Google API key warnings.

On the message board site Hacker News, there is also an opinion that 'Chromium, on which Thorium is based, is optimized to work as well as possible on all supported devices by default . Thorium, which was developed based on it, is designed to perform even better on modern CPUs with more instruction set extensions.'

The Thorium source code is available on GitHub.

GitHub - Alex313031/thorium
https://github.com/Alex313031/Thorium