Arch Linux User Repository

This package now uses the SSE3 version because benchmarks on my computers show no performance benefit from using the AVX/AVX2 versions.

I made alternate PKGBUILDs: SSE3, AVX, AVX2. (makepkg -p PKGBUILD.avx2)

However, there is no point making dedicated packages for each because there is no performance benefit from using different versions.

The "normal" version ("AVX") does reference avx2 in the config, but the exact compiler flags are unspecified. All 64-bit versions contain AVX and AVX2 instructions. So too do the Chromium binaries from the official Arch repos. Chromium-based browsers probably detect processor capabilities at runtime, so attempting to target specific instruction sets would not be expected to significantly improve performance.

Here are my results from browserbench.org speedometer 2.1, using fresh profiles:

• SSE3: 83.8±1.0
• AVX: 83.8±1.0 (not a mistake, SSE3 and AVX had identical results)
• AVX2: 83.6±1.9

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@jronald That is outside the scope of packaging. From the readme, some patches from ungoogled chromium are already included. If that isn't enough, you can open an issue upstream. However, I doubt you're likely to convince the developer to drop features he actually uses.

What about ungoogling it like ungoogled-chromium?

Optional dependency should now be kwallet not kwallet5.

There is no need to change any of the PKGBUILDs unless something is broken because they all attempt to use the latest available version. To see this:

$ grep '^pkgver=' PKGBUILD*
$ makepkg -Cdop PKGBUILD.avx2
$ git diff -- PKGBUILD.avx2

The -bin suffix is required for AUR packages of this type. The sse3/avx/avx2 identifiers distinguish the packages from each other and prevent conflicts. This way, building a different version does not overwrite the package from another version, and they can all be installed simultaneously for benchmarking.

I switched this package to the SSE3 version because, as far as I can tell, all chromium-based browsers contain and use AVX2 instructions when supported by the processor.

You can see that all of them contain AVX2 instructions with aur/intelxed. To demonstrate with extra/chromium:

$ xed -i /usr/lib/chromium/chromium | grep AVX2 | head

So why use this package instead of another? The binaries were built with profile-guided optimization, which improves performance by about 15-20%. Most packages that build chromium from source have PGO disabled. Building with PGO and debugging failures is extremely time consuming.

Hello. I've recently commented here on switching AVX2 repo from main one to AVX2 special, however it has become a public archive from 2024-02-22 and as far as I can see you have reflected these changes in your PKGBUILD.avx2 as well. But according to this post all builds are now in the main repository so you can keep pkgver variable in all of your PKGBUILD files equal (which now should be 122.0.6261.132)

I also have a question about weird in my opinion naming scheme: pkgname variable in your PKGBUILD adds "-bin" to the end of default package name and due to _pkgname also adding hardware extension postfix it turns into some terrible mess. Why not just name it "thorium-browser" for all versions? A vast amount of AUR and Arch packages use these naming scheme where you have "<name>" version for stable releases and "<name>-git" version for top of trunk ones. I see absolutely no reason to have any other package name than just "thorium-browser".

Again, it is not a very complicated task to just change PKGBUILD files content on your own, however it is pretty annoying doing so each time you want to update the package.

Thank you for your work. Despite all my complaints it is still a great repository.

Regarding AVX2 performance, it's really up to the scenarios (e.g. WebAssembly, WebRTC, WebGPU etc.) and the CPU model you are using. Most modern CPUs have AVX2 instrument built-in. Enabling AVX2 simply does not harm. For those who don't have AVX2 can just use chromium.

Thanks a lot for the information and the fantastic work with these AUR packages. I really mean it!

@josete That is another type of "popup". Unfortunately, it's an overloaded term. I have no problems creating bookmarks.

ArchWiki page about AUR has a lot of information. In short, you can make and install the package with the following commands:

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/thorium-browser-bin.git
cd thorium-browser-bin
_pkgver=120.0.6099.235 makepkg
sudo pacman -U thorium-browser-bin-120.0.6099.235-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst

Adjust the commands according to the package and what you are trying to accomplish.

Maybe what I call a popup screen is something else. One example is the button "Add this page to bookmarks" (I think that's the right name). A very little screen shows up asking for the right place to store the bookmark. Right there the system crashes. Anyway I'd like to go back to the previous version but I don't know what to do with this ... "_pkgver=120.0.6099.235 makepkg". My knoledge in Linux is still very limited. I guess I'll find it in the Archwiki. Thanks!

@josete I am unable to reproduce your issue after visiting top several search results for "popup test" on Arch, Plasma, X11. However, another Manjaro user previously reported a system lockup.

Try searching for related issues at Alex313031/thorium/issues. If you don't find anything, you can consider opening a new one.