Thorium Browser M156 Beta Drops With Chromium 156

Maintaining a heavy, feature-rich web browser fork is a relentless battle against upstream code churn. When project lead Alex313031(Alex Frick) was temporarily unavailable to push updates, project collaborator gz83 stepped in to keep the engine rolling.

The team just dropped a massive milestone release: the Thorium M156 Beta (v156.0.8078.28), bringing a heavy suite of performance optimizations and an engine bump straight to power users.

Key Takeaways

• Upstream Chromium Jump: The new beta updates the browser core from version 154 to Chromium 156.0.8078.28, inheriting critical memory safety and stability patches.
• Hardware-Optimized Builds: Thorium continues its trademark custom compilation strategy, providing specialized installer packages tailored for SSE3, SSE4, AVX, AVX2, and AVX512 instruction sets.
• Built-In Ad Blocking: The bundled version of uBlock Origin is updated to v1.75.0, retaining offline installation support for newly initialized user profiles.

For those unfamiliar with the project, Thorium was built to squeeze every drop of performance out of Google’s Chromium engine by compiling binaries with aggressive compiler flags, removing telemetry, and enabling experimental media codecs disabled in standard builds.

While the release is technically flagged as a “Beta” only because main maintainer Alex hasn’t given it an official stable stamp, gz83 notes that the code is heavily tested and stable for daily use.

Under the hood, the M156 upgrade inherits significant upstream features from Chromium, alongside custom patches engineered specifically for the Thorium ecosystem.

What’s New in Thorium M156

The release log covers dozens of low-level compiler fixes, cross-compilation adjustments for Windows SSE2 installers, and adjustments to Android extension-feature declarations that previously caused compilation errors.

Key functional updates include:

• Native JPEG XL Decoding: Enabled by default using the Rust-based decoder, supporting progressive images, HDR color spaces, and animated JXL files.
• Advanced WebCrypto Support: Expanded cryptographic algorithms now include ML-KEM, ML-DSA, X-Wing, and ChaCha20-Poly1305.
• Refined UI Iconography: Improved icon switching across browser UI and WebUI resources, allowing users to preserve legacy Chromium rounded icons via the `–disable-thorium-icons` launch flag.
• Enhanced JavaScript Modules: Implemented direct text imports using `with { type: “text” }` alongside automatic module fetch retries after network failures.

Custom Instruction Sets and Downloads

One of Thorium’s defining characteristics is its dedication to custom CPU instruction set optimization. Rather than shipping a single, bloated generic binary, the release repository provides hand-tuned builds across Linux (`.deb`, `.rpm`, `.AppImage`, and `.zip`), Windows (`.exe` installers and `.zip` archives), macOS (Universal/ARM64 and x64 DMGs), and Android (`.apk` builds for SystemWebView, public browser, and shell variants).

If you prefer a browser that stays lean, strips out Google’s tracking hooks, and leverages modern CPU instruction sets for lightning-fast JavaScript execution, grabbing the latest M156 binary from the Thorium release page is well worth the afternoon test drive.

Just make sure to submit any stray bug reports through the official GitHub issue tracker.