Thorium – Radioactive Chromium Fork | Hacker News Reader

Thorium – Radioactive Chromium Fork

github.com

18 pointskeepamovin26 comments

Project that contains (contained?) porn in the source tree https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium/pull/469 and I've heard the maintainer also promotes some quite reprehensible stuff. So I can't support it.

Like what? I'm genuinely curious.

https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium/blob/3759529384a18ae7c...

Hardly reprehensible. Not a very "professional thing sure, I wouldn't trust a browser made by someone who puts porn in the source but its not like its a moral failing for what seems to be someone's side project

Edit: I see the accusations of containing cp, that's way more concerning and obvious why you didn't link it but you could have just said that.

Yeah, man. Honestly it's kind of a sexy picture that yiff png^0. I ain't into furry shit and I think it's weird, but that's a pretty sexy pose right there for people of a certain orientation.

And hilariously it ain't no different to stock-standard fare you see everyday on tabloids, TV, or Instagram! Like WTAF people having a moral-panic-meltdown over this shit? hahaha. Secretly Google just melting because somebody actually made a good Chrome fork. Tho I'm scared by even thinking of saying this I'll have to kiss goodbye to my GMail account, and they'll probably cancel all my accounts but still keep charging my credit card with no way to purge, right? Amiright, ABC.XYZ? Sergey, I thought we were freeeeeeens? :) heh.

0: https://github.com/Alex313031/thorium/blob/3759529384a18ae7c...

I mean, weird to include it in a GitHub repo, but not evil. The fact that some NPCs are falling over themselves to call this evil (while probably repressed-guilt-projectively retreating to their private stashus of furry-et-al pon when the sun rises) suggests there's "rotten" in the state of browser forking, methinks! hahahahaha :)

In this repo: furry. A coworker of mine reported another repository of this author (or another contributor?) for according to my coworker containing CP. Read issue 474 as well.

That's disappointing. I don't understand why the author had to include this, it's so unnecessary.

seems dumb to include, but it's their choice

People throwing a fit over some furry art hidden in the source code is dumb.

CP would be another story entirely but I need evidence of that before I act on it.

afaik it wasn't CP per se, it was images of botched circumcisions because he is very anticircumcision and had that as evidence for why. Still not appropriate to be anywhere near a git repo but the context is vastly different than cp. This doesn't change the recommendation to not touch this project with a 100 foot pole, but I think context is important.

Previous HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38647363

> I've heard the maintainer also promotes some quite reprehensible stuff

What kind of stuff ?

holy shit.... https://old.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/18ihls8/dont_use_...

This is sad. I have been wanting a everything from a Chromium based browser that this appears to have on the box.

I can't install this on my work computer, which is where I need to solve the M$ Teams in Chrome/Chromium making my laptop sound like a 747 while slowing to a snail's pace.

Edit: To be 100% clear, my issue is with unknowingly one day the author could accept some NSFW content into the project, and it unknowingly make its way to my corporate issued laptop through an auto-update. The guy opened the door to this type of risk when the content was put there originally. I'm all for easter eggs, but when it's NSFW content inside a thing that people use for work, nope.

have you tried librewolf recently? I've been using it for 3-4 months just to get off chrome based stuff and I have been pretty impressed. It mostly works better than chrome and at least as well as brave for all the stuff I have thrown at it (I like the tabs better, I really like the container tabs option so I can stuff the spyware.. err social media in a very isolated framework), I really like that all the extensions I was using on chrome/brave work in librewolf or have better options. My only annoyance so far is bitwarden behaves weirdly in private windows and that's very minor.

I use FF as my daily for work. Chrome is simply there for Teams. Teams doesn't work so well in FF. I can't imagine Librewolf is any better than FF as far as Teams though.

I use FF containers for the tab isolation you're describing. It works very well for managing multiple AWS accounts at once.

I suppose you can just fork it and rid yourself of any lewd or unsavory or otherwise, uh, repulsive to your person content?

Didn't know that. That's weird. Seemed like a cool project from the GitHub :S but I was a little surprised I found such a gem that no one had posted in the last year! haha :)

BTW - how did you know that? Where did you hear about that? And what reprehensible stuff? o_O Now you've got me intrigued! haha :)

edit: I looked into it a little more and I kinda have the feeling that this could possibly be a novel-in-this-domain (yet-ancient-globally) way to takeout a potential (in this case, "browser fork") competitor: just plant something morally reprehensible about them, to lie/dissemble to try to trash their reputation and make people scared to associate.

If this were what it is, it would reveal that the simple act of forking (successfully -- moderately) a browser was so threatening to the browser monopolies as to be surprising. This is interesting! hahaha :)

Depends on what kind of porn. Society needs porn. If it is legit adult porn stuff, that's ok. I would prefer donating to legit porn cause than any political superpacs. You know, some societies view politicians worse off than whores. At least whores earn honest work. You have no idea what kind of unprotective act those politician exposed to (I have decades experience in this industry, it is way more dirty than Hollywood shown)...I can name a few: Feinstein, Biden, Pelosi, AOC, Mitt, etc.

I may not want to know...but, pray tell, a little bit?

Fantastic to see this project... hopefully they'll remove all the enterprise cloud and MDM related requirements for using various browser policies (MetricsReportingEnabled,EnterpriseRealTimeUrlCheckMode, etc) along with a re-enabling a few policies that were annoyingly deprecated like the NTP related settings, HomepageIsNewTabPage, HomepageLocation, and easier side-loading of local extensions sources.

My understanding of the controversy around this project and/or its developer:

- The repository, as well as some of the dev’s other projects, contained furry porn. I believe this has since been removed from Thorium.

- The Thorium website also contained an archive of a different website that existed to dissuade people from infant circumcision. In my view, this is a justified viewpoint, though I know not everyone may agree. Regardless of your stance on it, though, I think we can all agree that this is neither a relevant or professional thing to include in a browser project, /nor child pornography/. CP accusations are extremely serious and I have seen no evidence to suggest they’re justified.

All in all, it appears that what started as a small pet project, along with the dev’s personal views and quirks, quickly gained traction amongst others who were then taken aback by seeing content they didn’t expect. I can’t comment on the value of Thorium from a technical perspective, but it seems a shame to spread misinformation about a developer who doesn’t seem to have done anything particularly reprehensible.

This is all my present understanding. If I’ve missed anything, I’d welcome corrections.

  If you can keep your head when all about you   
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   
  If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;   
  If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
  Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

Embodiment of Kipling in your statement above. Bravo, sire!

I mean I don't know if I want to pin my flag on this guy's crusade but I respect the contrarian calm in a sea of panicking hysterical activists carrying pitchforks.

Combined with other quotes, we might even have unlocked a cure to mass hysterical online panic (I'm dubbing it MHOLP for short, hahaha):

- CP would be another story entirely but I need evidence of that before I act on it. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38856103)

- Hardly reprehensible. Not a very "professional thing sure, I wouldn't trust a browser made by someone who puts porn in the source but its not like its a moral failing for what seems to be someone's side project (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38855775)

You unsung heroes, go you!

FYI a number of streaming sites won't work - while this has Widevine, it does not have Verified Media Path (VMP) which verifies that you're running a signed binary. https://github.com/Alex313031/Thorium-Win-AVX2/issues/84#iss...

https://github.com/castlabs/electron-releases is an interesting Electron fork with full Widevine+VMP support - but it's very much closed-source.

EDIT: wrote this before I saw other comments - be aware that Thorium likely has NSFW content in old commits and should not be cloned locally in corporate environments. AFAIK this doesn't apply to the castlabs link above which is an entirely unrelated project.

It's a cool list of patches.

I love these projects that bundle a bunch of cool things together with a base thing. Bazzite is a SteamOS project that similarly bundles all kinds of crazy things, and was a very popular recent submission, for another example. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38828040 https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite

The maintenance style here looks difficult. They seem to somehow take chunks of new chromium releases and make commits with those dropped in changes, and fix random stuff for a while. Looks very arduous. It makes me appreciate a somewhat opposed style, the Debian's Quilt model, where you have take the upstream and keep reapplying a set of patches to upstream. Maintaining is then just re-hacking any patches that break, and authoring new patches, whenever reapplying breaks. Seems like it'd be much easier to maintain, long run.

I was also hoping for something like the Quilt model because it seemed like it would be a good way to learn some shit about Chromium! Having the patches on hand would point to some key parts of the code-base, I feel! Im not sure how I'd learn what went into this fork, other than meticulously going through history. The readme also doesn't link to where it sources it's many patches from (which is another thing Bazzite did an excellent job of!).

Kind of interesting seeing a spreading focus on using more/modern x86-64 extensions spreading. Ubuntu is dabbling with what they are calling x86-64-v3, Red Hat too. https://www.phoronix.com/news/RedHat-RHEL10-x86-64-v3-Explor... https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-x86-64-v3-Experiment

I don't understand why they name projects after something that has nothing to do with the project. What do they hope to achieve when someone goes to search for Thorium in a search engine?

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