Do not use Thorium.

2023-12-14

UPDATE: The author has now disabled the ability to create issues for non-contributors and has started to delete issues that he does not like in an effort to silence people.

First of all, since I probably won't make another blog post this year I would like to wish you a merry christmas and a happy new year. Whatever, who even cares.

Do not use Thorium. Throium is a Chromium-based web browser which aims to remove a lot of bloat and build with specific compiler optimization flags for speed. While I will not deny that it is faster (people have proven this), I want to talk about a much bigger problem with the project.

But first, I want to mention that you can get most of what Thorium does by simply compiling upstream Chromium manually. Thorium is really just a modified version of Chromium with optimized compiler flags, something that you can do yourself with relative ease.

In any case, today I want to talk about an issue that was made on the Thorium GitHub page, which I participated in. it was a simple question asking why going to chrome://yiff is a valid URL in the browser. Yes, you heard me right. Before the last commit, was made, if you go to chrome://yiff in the URL bar on Thorium, you got to a page displaying yiff, also known as furry pornography.

There is no excuse for this. It is absolutely disgusting, and a web browser should definitely not have porn bundled in with it. But the real problem is how the situation is and has been handled. The first comment in response to this issue is simply a smug "skill issue" which shows how mature these people really are, though it should be noted that he is not a contributor nor a collaborator. There were a surprising amount of people who actually AGREED with the project author, and genuinely believe that a serious web browser project is supposed to have porn bundled with it.

After a while, I chose to respond to the issue because I don't want people to use a web browser with porn. So I responded with:

But I also attached something else in an edit. Because my friend actually called the author's number which he listed on his website to ask about this (though I won't link to it), but if you're curious you can hear an audio recording of the call here.

In any case, while there were a lot of weird people who are mostly into this furry nonsense themselves who were praising the author for this "based" decision, people started to call the author out on this, including myself. Later in the thread, I said:

And this is something I stand by. Unfortunately, at around 1AM CET the issue was closed for being "too heated", despite the severity of the issue. Later though, around 2 hours before writing this the author reopened the issue to post a response himself and then closed it as completed. This is his response:

As you can clearly see, he has no remorse for anything, he does not care about the fact that half of the users don't like to have pornography in their web browser. Alex is 22 fucking years old, I really expect better behavior from someone of that age. Thorium really just seems like a 13 year old's joke project rather than a real project with a real goal.

So the issue is closed, and the author decided to remove the pornography from the browser. Everything is good, right? No, because a few hours later a new issue is opened simply titled "On closing issue #463":

He's right. To me, it feels like the author closed the issue so that people would stop telling him about the problem, and so he doesn't actually have to fix the issue in question. He wanted to shut everyone up, not actually improve the project or you know, apologize for adding porn into his software which probably thousands have installed. This is made abundantly clear because the author decided to delete several comments on the new issue, probably because they said something he didn't like. It's such a stupid move, and a slap in the face to people who use your software.

Even Brodie Robertson decided to join in, stating:

And he is absolutely right. You're just censoring people for no good reason, instead of dealing with the actual problem which is that porn is included with your software. Finally, Alex agrees to fix it and makes a commit which seems to remove the porn from the project. However, despite this I strongly suggest that you stop using Thorium if you are using it. Tell your friends to stop using it as well. Sure, the issue has been fixed but clearly he didn't want to remove this from his project, and he has no problem silencing those who simply want to improve the product. Would you put your trust in a project like this? If it can have pornography, why not malware? This is not how you should act as a developer, and I am very disappointed to see this.

But hold on, it gets even better. Thanks to user finnurthorisson on issue 468, we happen to have the comments that were deleted and as you might have guessed, these comments show evidence that this is not just a mistake.

I don't know about you, but I don't think you'd commit this by accident a total of SIX times. Not only is this disgusting, distasteful, immature and disrespectful to your contributors and users, it might actually break GitHub's Terms of Service. The ToS does not allow repositories to contain pornography.

The absolute worst thing however, which I was told about just after I finished writing this blog post is the GitHub repository for his website contained and still contains child pornography. I won't link to it because it is incredibly disgusting (and I have reported the repository in question) but you should be able to find it if you find the repository and search through the commit history.

I think I've said enough. Just thought I'd write this blog post because it's important that you know about it. Personally, I would not trust someone like this, and I would stop using Thorium right away. There is little reason to use it anyway for the reasons I described above, so I won't reiterate. In any case, thank you for reading and have a good day!

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