Thorium is a Chromium fork developed by a young lad that also worked on forks of Atom, ChromiumOS and Gecko and even a Thorium build specific for Windows 7. But why am I talking about this?
As some people already know, some time ago Alex, the main developer of the Thorium project was involved in some drama related to his project; users reported encountering some “easter eggs” hidden within the source code; in short these were sexually alluring furry drawings located in a special chrome flag named chrome://yiff and also in some other places in the browser source code and on the dev’s website as well.
To be honest these pictures were not all that bad (by today’s standards), just some random pictures from the guy’s yiff stash. But we don’t need a genius to see what is the actual problem here.
Is important to add that after being quiet for some time, Alex made a blog post talking about the issues and taking criticism in a respectful way, while there was also something related to circumcision there I will not be talking here since it goes completely out of the path I am trying to get.
Even thought this isn’t a issue related to security or stability, it was enough to create a somewhat big discussion about it and, of course, lots of drama. In my Telegram channel I even remembered Chris Titus reaction to the matter since he was using Thorium as his main browser at that moment in time.
The most important question is about if a developer should do something like this in the first place. Can you go and create a furry-centered browser? Yeah sure, but advertise it like so hahaha.
At least these main problems were addressed by the developer himself in his blog, which I adapted below:
- Minors could be using the browser, and run into it.
- The artist was not asked or given credit for their work.
- It is unprofessional for a publicly available browser.
- It potentially violates the dev’s own CoC
I don’t care if the person that is working on a project is a furry (and surprisingly there seems to bet a lot of them on the IT world), because just like with political ideologies if it doesn’t infect the main product it’s not really an big issue. However in the case of Thorium the browser gained a lot of traction due to the curiosity of people and even managed to get videos featured in bigger tech channels around Youtube, and as far as Alex said, the pictures were added when the browser was just a small project with a small userbase.
In another take Palemoon browser was also created by a furry and it does not involved itself in any issues related to that in particular or even in politics as far as I know, with the developer even going out of Patreon after the platform started openly supporting BLM since it went against his idea of a neutral platform, it seems like Straver is more of a old-school furry and keep things to himself and his browser politically/ideologically neutral as it should be.
In short I put Thorium in the “better than using Google Chrome” category together with Brave or Vivaldi, while still not being the ultimate best performance browser like it sells itself, it is a no-frills Chrome that still keeps Google services if you really need them (unlike Ungoogled Chromium), so it is basically a tweaked Chromium that still looks like the stock browser, the same can be said about Mercury Browser too but with Gecko instead. The only issue about it is the fact that the browser is maintained by just one single person, which can be a issue regarding security updates and such.
I hope that this episode can be a lesson to Alex in being more professional about his projects, and for being such a young developer I liked how he managed the issue by bringing to himself instead of covering it up, continuing to work on the project.
Am I going to use Thorium? I tested it but didn’t saw the appeal, however you can give it a try yourself too. I personally liked Floorp Browser more but I still miss the Tab Group feature of Chromium sometimes…
And I can already predict that this isn’t the last time that I will be talking about furries in my blog, oh well...