Is Thorium the fastest Browser in planet Earth?

[amethyst]

I'm more interested in your personal experience as Puppy Linux user. Did you test it yourself (and compared it to other browsers you have been using) and do you think it's the fastest and best and should be recommended to Puppy users. Is it faster and better than the official Chromium browser for instance because it's a fork of Chromium?

[amethyst]

@pp4mnklinux Why did you delete your opening post. You have invited users into a discussion about a topic that could be useful for Puppy Linux and when they respond you delete your opening post.

[Wiz57]

@pp4mnklinux Why did you delete your opening post. You have invited users into a discussion about a topic that could be useful for Puppy Linux and when they respond you delete your opening post.

Good question amethyst! It's very irritating, isn't it. I recently read something about Thorium browser on another site, ZDNet I think it was, but the results of a few tests posted there left me, let's just say unimpressed. If I can find that article I may post a link to it. Thorium is basically yet another chromium fork with a few optimizations, and for me sometimes speed isn't the only factor.
Wiz

edit to add link...
Found it.. https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/w ... -download/

[mikewalsh]

Hm.

Reading about it here:-

https://thorium.rocks/optimizations

.....it looks like the devs have decided to take the same route as that being discussed by Moonchild & company over at the Pale Moon forums; the requirement for AES/AVX CPU instructions. Which most certainly will speed up the browser, because it then takes advantage of stuff already built-in to modern processors.....but it also means that many owners of older hardware are then denied another piece of software because of design choices.

The ultimate plan, of course, is to scrap all those older machines. If you WANT to be a part of the modern computing scene, you MUST upgrade to new hardware. Or so the thinking goes.....

I suspect this is the thin end of the wedge, and we'll be seeing much more of this over the next few years. Most of you with 2nd-Gen or later Intel Core processors won't be able to understand the fuss, since this is part of your CPU instructions anyway. But it annoys me, 'cos although this Pentium G5400 is 8th-Gen, Intel saw fit to leave these instructions out of the mix.....reinforcing the belief - professed by modern geeks - that anything at 5 yrs old is only fit for the scrap heap!

(*sigh...*)

Perhaps I'll end up upgrading the CPU. With the LGA 1151 socket, I do at least have quite a number of AES/AVX-compatible choices....

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This has uncomfortable parallels with the direction European regulations are taking. There are proposals, currently going through the European Parliament, to force anyone who runs a historic or vintage vehicle off the road because of the age of the vehicle. They're annoyed there hasn't been a more enthusiastic response to / uptake of EVs.....and the idea is to force any vehicle over a certain age off the road. If you want to continue to use the road, you'll have no option but to put yourself up to the neck in debt for an environmentally-friendly, hyper-expensive electric vehicle......just so the top brass of these companies can continue to enjoy their massive annual bonuses (and certain politicians can continue to receive their under-the-table "backhanders", while at the same time crowing about how "green" their credentials are!).

Legalese & lobbying. Where would we be without 'em? God bless capitalism.....hah!!

Mike.

[amethyst]

So, in the opening post a youtube video of some random guy was posted (that's all). I actually watched the video.This guy did a (sort of) speed test basically comparing it to Firefox that he was using. He did mention in the video that Thorium was a fork of Chromium but never compared it to Chromium...

[amethyst]

If you WANT to be a part of the modern computing scene, you MUST upgrade to new hardware. Or so the thinking goes.....

See Clarity.. Sorry, couldn't resist.

[amethyst]

Thorium is based on an older version of Chromium. In my experience older versions of Chromium are quite a bit faster (on older machines at least) than the newer ones. I use the latest Brave (Chromium based) with Fossa9.6 and Chromium version 90 (older) with Jammy. The older version is very fast.

[geo_c]

Thorium is based on an older version of Chromium. In my experience older versions of Chromium are quite a bit faster (on older machines at least) than the newer ones. I use the latest Brave (Chromium based) with Fossa9.6 and Chromium version 90 (older) with Jammy. The older version is very fast.

The fastest browsers I ever used were the older versions of Iron.

[Wiz57]

Thorium is based on an older version of Chromium. In my experience older versions of Chromium are quite a bit faster (on older machines at least) than the newer ones. I use the latest Brave (Chromium based) with Fossa9.6 and Chromium version 90 (older) with Jammy. The older version is very fast.

The fastest browsers I ever used were the older versions of Iron.

Well, if you want to base it on pure speed, NOTHING touched Lynx back in the old days, LOL! It blew the socks off anything MS or NetScape had to offer, mainly because you didn't have to download all the images! Now, when I went to Windows 3.1, I found Opera 3.X...that was fast. But back in those halcyon days of dialup internet at 14.4 baud, I booted normally to plain old DOS, and used either Arachne or Lynx386, unless I happened to fire up DosLynx. Text browsers just couldn't be beat for speed...
in those days!
Wiz

[geo_c]

Thorium is based on an older version of Chromium. In my experience older versions of Chromium are quite a bit faster (on older machines at least) than the newer ones. I use the latest Brave (Chromium based) with Fossa9.6 and Chromium version 90 (older) with Jammy. The older version is very fast.

The fastest browsers I ever used were the older versions of Iron.

Well, if you want to base it on pure speed, NOTHING touched Lynx back in the old days, LOL! It blew the socks off anything MS or NetScape had to offer, mainly because you didn't have to download all the images! Now, when I went to Windows 3.1, I found Opera 3.X...that was fast. But back in those halcyon days of dialup internet at 14.4 baud, I booted normally to plain old DOS, and used either Arachne or Lynx386, unless I happened to fire up DosLynx. Text browsers just couldn't be beat for speed...
in those days!
Wiz

Well I still have elinks and lynx installed on all my OSs, and they have there place, but it's always a tradeoff with browsers. For a good amount of time in 2022-23 I was posting to the forum from lynx and elinks, just for no reason whatsoever but to prove that I could navigate it.

I booted portable Iron about 6 months ago and it was still BLAZING fast, mostly in the speed which is opens up. Much faster than say ungoogled Chromium. Loading webpages has a lot of variables involved, like extensions installed and that kind of thing, as well as the speed of the server itself.

Today I booted portable Midori put together by @fredx181, and it opened up instantaneously. That's a pretty nice browser, but for some reason when I used the terminal update script, the terminal output said the midori.tar.bz2 couldn't be unpacked. But that should go in the midori topic instead of here.