M116

• The old VaapiVideoDecodeAccelerator path was completely removed upstream, in favour of the new VDAVideoDecoder backend that now powers both Chromium and ChromiumOS. Consequently, the VAAPI and Intel HD patches were removed. The VDPAU patch is now the only remaining graphics patch, for Nvidia users. This should hopefully fix issues people have been having with VAAPI and Wayland. Indeed some people have commented in this issue saying that a vanilla graphics backend works better than Thorium with all of the patches applied.
• chrome://whats-new page has been re-enabled by me, after Google made it "Chrome only". You will see it launch in a new tab on every version upgrade.
• I enabled an experimental setting in Appearance to toggle tab hover cards. This can also be controlled via the traditional chrome://flags flag
• I enabled an upcoming UI design change that was supposed to land in M117, but I enabled it early. This moves the Extensions submenu from "More Tools" in the main menu, into its own dedicated menu item.
• New "Name Window" item in "More Tools". This allows you to manually override the window name, i.e. what appears in the window's title and what appears in the taskbar.
• initial_preferences file is now included in the Windows installer, to show the Welcome page on first launch after the first install.
• New internal variable specifying the type (i.e. AVX, AVX2, SSE3, etc.) is being shipped to facilitate the new Thorium-Win-Updater project me and ltguillaume have been working on, to allow auto update for Windows (Linux users already have it, if you are using the deb repo).

Thanks @gz83 @ltguillaume for helping.

Also, on another note, people have been complaining about me not releasing a new version on the exact same day as a new major Chromium version. To those people, I say, every major version takes me about 6+ Hours of intensive work to rebase. This is followed by many more hours for both me and @gz83 and @midzer to build each version, and this is assuming we are using all of our CPU cores pegged at 100% usage, which also slows our machines to a crawl for if we want to do anything else. Please be patient. If people still make issues or discussions about this, my response will be going forward: Then you try maintaining a Chromium fork!

[UPDATE] Look at this cool comparison a guy made, showing Thorium coming out on top in terms of performance when compared with other browsers! > https://giannirosato.com/blog/post/browser-benchmarks/ One thing I don't like about his methodology though, is that he also includes Safari on an iPad. iPad and desktop are not really comparable, giving the iPad a disadvantage, but also, since Apple ties their hardware and software together so tightly, they may get an advantage by being able to optimize safari specific to each ipad model in a way that is impossible with traditional desktop software that will run on a variety of machines.