– Special and Experimental builds, sometimes for other CPUs (read the readme), are located at > https://github.com/Alex313031/Thorium-Special You can find builds for Piledriver/Steamroller/Excavator CPUS, Haswell CPUs, as well as SSE4, SSE4.2, and pure AVX builds. \
– NEW: Thorium Special now also has experimental Android ARM64 builds.
– Includes Widevine, FFmpeg, Chrome Plugins, as well as thinLTO, CFlag, LLVM Loop, and PGO compiler optimizations. It is built with SSE4, AVX, and FMA, so it won't launch on CPU's below 4th gen Core or AMD FX, but benefits from Advanced Vector EXtensions. You can disable this and use regular SSE3 like Chromium and Chrome. (See below.)
> - Patches from Debian including font rendering patch, VAAPI Patch, Intel HD support patch, native notifications patch, title bar patch, and... the VDPAU Patch!! (Rejoice Nvidia users)
> - Includes installer patches and files to include ChromeDriver and content_shell, with a .desktop file being provided for content_shell (named thorium-shell.desktop and shows in desktop environments as Thorium Content Shell). You can also run content_shell with the command thorium-shell (custom wrapper for it, located in /usr/bin/). You can run ChromeDriver at /usr/bin/chromedriver.
> - Right clicking the launcher after install gives two additional desktop actions, one to open content-shell, and another to open in safe mode which disables any flags one has set in chrome://flags until the next launch.
– args.gn exclude API Keys (you can get them yourself) and the pgo profile path is different for each chromium version (only needed when building). (See below.)
In general follow build instructions at https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/main/docs/linux/build_instructions.md and API Keys (if desired) at https://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/api-keys
_**The scripts assume the Chromium source is at $HOME/chromiums/src/. You may have to 'sudo chmod +x' the scripts to make them executable.**_
- After initial download of Chromium source code, run (from where you cloned this repo) `./trunk.sh`. This will update and sync the sources and at the end it will download the PGO profile for chromium. The file will be downloaded to *//chromium/src/chrome/build/pgo_profiles/*.profdata* with the actual file name looking something like 'chrome-linux-main-1632505958-ddbb37bcdfa7dbd7b10cf3a9b6a5bc45e7a958a6.profdata', which should be added to the end of args.gn as per below.
- Then, (from where you cloned this repo) run `./setup.sh`. This will copy all the files and patches to the needed locations and drop you to *//chromium/src*.
- Run `export EDITOR=nano`&`export VISUAL=nano`*# You can substitute a cmdline editor like vim here, but many GUI editors cause it to try and parse the args.gn file before it is even saved.*
- Run `gn args out/thorium` and the contents of 'args.gn' in this repo should be copy/pasted into the editor. *--Include your api keys here at the top or leave blank, and edit the last line to point to the actual path and file name of '*.profdata'*
- 'args.list' contains an alphabetical list with descriptions of all possible build arguments; gn_args.list gives a similar list but with the flags in args.gn added.
- To build, run `autoninja -j8 -C out/thorium chrome chrome_sandbox content_shell -d stats`*The -j# can be changed to limit or increase the number of jobs (generally should be the number of CPU cores on your machine), and the -d stats at the end just shows better verbose stats during compiling. You could also append chromedriver (the releases have chromedriver) after content_shell to build chromedriver, the selenium compatible browser fuzzing library.*
- To install, copy/paste the contents of your *out/thorium* dir to a good location, i.e. *$HOME/bin/thorium*. **RECOMMENDED - Copy and run clean.sh within this dir to clean up build artifacts**. Then you can just run the browser with `~/bin/thorium/chrome`, the content_shell with `~/bin/thorium/content_shell`, or chromedriver with `~/bin/thorium/chromedriver`.
- **Proper Install:** To install with a .deb, dont copy the contents of *out/thorium*; instead run <br/>`autoninja -C out/thorium/ "chrome/installer/linux:unstable_deb"` A nice .deb file will now be in *out/thorium* and you can install it with `sudo dpkg -i *.deb` It will be called 'thorium-browser-unstable_$VERSIONNUMBER_amd64.deb', and will be installed to */opt/chromium.org/thorium-unstable/*. \
NOTE: To get back to "Trunk", i.e. to revert all changes in order to build vanilla chromium, just run `./trunk.sh` again. \
NOTE: To compile without AVX, simply go to *//chromium/src/build/config/compiler/BUILD.gn*, search for *mavx* (there's only two <br/> lines), and replace *mavx* with *msse3*, then remove the lines right under both of those that contain *"-ffp-contract=fast",*
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChromiumBrowser/ is a subreddit I made for Thorium and general Chromium discussion and https://alex313031.blogspot.com/ is a blog I made relating to Chromium/ChromiumOS. I also build ChromiumOS with codecs, linux-firmware/modules, and added packages at > https://github.com/Alex313031/ChromiumOS/
− Thanks to https://github.com/robrich999/ for some info that went into this project.\
− Also thanks to https://github.com/bromite/bromite, https://github.com/saiarcot895/chromium-ubuntu-build, https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium, and https://github.com/GrapheneOS/Vanadium for patch code.
