Thorium is a BSD-3-Clause licensed Chromium fork, written in C++ and named after radioactive element No. 90, that ships optimised Linux builds here while Windows, macOS, Android and Raspberry Pi builds live in companion repositories.

What it is

Thorium is a fork of the Chromium browser, always built against the latest LTS version of Chromium and intended to behave like, and carry the feature set of, Google Chrome. The source code and the Linux releases are hosted in this repository; the Windows, macOS, Android, Raspberry Pi and legacy builds are hosted in separate repositories linked near the top of the README. The project lives squarely in the Chromium ecosystem, tracking upstream Chromium rather than building an engine of its own, and it carries patches drawn from Debian and from Bromite alongside its own.

The concrete problem it solves is upstream removal and default-off behaviour. Stock Chromium and Chrome have dropped or disabled things Thorium restores: FTP URL support, JPEG XL image format support, the pre-M124 "Chrome Refresh 2023" user interface, the classic Download Shelf, and codec coverage. Thorium ships Widevine, all codecs, and proper HEVC/H.265 support on Linux and Windows. It also changes defaults, enabling Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control out of the box, and showing full URLs including trailing slashes in the address bar. In short, it is the replacement for a plain Chromium or Chrome install for users who want those specific behaviours back.

Key capabilities

• CPU-targeted release builds using SIMD instruction sets, published as SSE3, SSE4, AVX and AVX2 variants in the Releases section, with guidance in docs/ABOUT_RELEASES.md#about-simd.
• Compiler optimisations applied to the build, including LTO, CFlag, LDFlag, LLVM Loop and PGO, documented in docs/PATCHES.md.
• Media coverage: Widevine, all codecs, proper HEVC/H.265 on Linux and Windows, experimental MPEG-DASH support, and JPEG XL restored and turned on by default.
• Restored FTP URL support, enabled by default.
• Classic user interface restoration: the pre-M124 Chrome UI behind the flag chrome://flags/#thorium-2024, and the classic Download Shelf behind chrome://flags/#download-shelf.
• Privacy defaults and patches: Do Not Track enabled by default, Global Privacy Control added and enabled, and DNS over HTTPS patches from Bromite.
• Debian-derived patches covering font rendering, VAAPI, the audio sandbox, GPU drivers, GTK auto dark mode, native notifications, the title bar, and the VDPAU patch.

Who uses it and how

• Linux desktop users who add the deb repository from the project website to get auto-updating installs rather than manually downloading release archives.
• Raspberry Pi owners running Pi 3B, 3B+, 4 or 400 boards, served by the dedicated Thorium-Raspi repository.
• Users on older or unusual hardware: 32-bit builds for old CPUs come from Thorium-Special, and Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8 and 8.1 builds come from thorium-legacy.
• macOS users on M1 and X64 machines, Windows users, and Android users on arm32 and arm64, each served by their own repository.
• Developers, who get the Chromium toolchain surface as a baseline, reflected in the project topics covering chrome-devtools, chromedriver and content-shell.

This is a community project: roughly 7,500 stars, 283 forks and 140 open issues, with no vendor behind it.

Getting started

Download the appropriate archive from the Releases page for this repository, choosing the SSE3, SSE4, AVX or AVX2 build that matches the CPU, or add the deb repository published at https://thorium.rocks/ for auto-updating installs on Linux.

How it compares

Against Google Chrome, the differences are licensing and control: Thorium is BSD-3-Clause and community-built, while Chrome is proprietary, and Thorium restores formats and interfaces that Chrome has removed, including JPEG XL and FTP. Against upstream Chromium, Thorium keeps Widevine, all codecs and HEVC/H.265 support, and incorporates patches from Debian and Bromite that upstream does not carry. Neither upstream project offers the CPU-specific SSE3, SSE4, AVX and AVX2 build variants found here.

When to use it — and when not to

Anyone installing Thorium takes on a build maintained by volunteers rather than a vendor, so security updates track Chromium LTS releases and the maintainers' cadence instead of a supported release channel, and there is no commercial support contract. Documentation is spread across several files, including docs/PATCHES.md, docs/TH_24.md and docs/ABOUT_RELEASES.md, and the README excerpt itself is truncated, so users should expect to read the repository files before installing. Organisations that require managed browser policy, an enterprise support agreement or a guaranteed patch SLA should not standardise on it; users on hardware not covered by the linked platform repositories will need to check whether a suitable build exists at all.