M114

Upstream Changes

• Chromium 114 has even better support for WebGPU than 113. For more info about this, see the previous release notes.
• Chromium and Thorium now support specifying and appending commandline flags via the CHROME_EXTRA_FLAGS environment variable. For example: export CHROME_EXTRA_FLAGS="--no-sandbox" and then running thorium-browser from the same shell, will append --no-sandbox. You could set this in your ~/.bashrc or /etc/profile However, keep in mind that Thorium already also has a custom way to set default flags, by making/editing ~/.config/thorium-flags.conf
• V8 (Chromium's JavaScript engine) has added some new optimizations to the Maglev compiler. A noticeable difference in JIT javascript compilation can be seen between Chromium 113 and 114. Interesting read here > https://blog.chromium.org/2023/06/how-chrome-achieved-high-scores-on.html Thanks @midzer for telling me about this.

Thorium Changes

• libjxl updated to 0.8.2 (Adds better transparency/alpha support) Thanks @gz83 for helping me with this.
• libhighway updated to 1.0.4 (Minor SIMD upgrade)
• Fixes for Wayland (should hopefully fix https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium/issues/162)
• HEVC and AC3 support have been restored (as promised)
• More Android ARM64 optimizations
• New "media foundation" widevine path on Windows by using the enable_media_foundation_widevine_cdm = true args.gn flag (should hopefully fix https://github.com/Alex313031/Thorium-Win/issues/48 and https://github.com/Alex313031/Thorium-AVX2/issues/84)
• RPM support so that people on those distros don't have to use the .zip or .appimage anymore. (Fixes https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium/issues/139) IMPORTANT You will have to use sudo rpm --install --nodeps file.rpm because it tries to install libffmpeg.so.
• Debian 12 "Bookworm" Support

I am also working on a Flatpak, but I don't think I'm ever going to publicly release a snap of Thorium, because the performance is egregious, and I disagree with the walled garden practices that Canonical takes with snapcraft. I would like help making the Flatpak, so if anyone out there knows about flatpak/flathub, don't hesitate to contact me, start a discussion, or submit a pull request.