Thorium

[UCyborg]

Both Thorium and Supermium manage to destabilize my XP's USB stack to the point it's not detecting things being unplugged and plugged until the browser is closed. Thorium specifically is useless for Google Drive here as well, tab crashes as soon as I'm in. Both are buggy in fonts department (from disappearing fonts to incorrect rendering).

[Dave-H]

Thorium (and Supermium) are very stable for me too.
In fact, I don't think I've ever had a crash while using them unless they run out of memory, in which case only the current tab crashes, as designed.
Occasionally I have had Thorium crash on start up. It appears for an instant in the taskbar, and then vanishes. Task Manager shows several thorium.exe processes still running.
If I leave them alone, and just run the browser again, it then opens fine.

That's on my main desktop.
I've now put Thorium on the XP side of my very underpowered netbook, and that's very unstable.
It opens fine, but trying to do anything often just produces a crashed tab with a 'status_access_violation' error.
If I keep trying, however, the tab always eventually opens, and once the tab is open, it seems to be perfectly stable.
Very odd!

[AstroSkipper]

My Thorium installation and configuration is very stable under Windows XP. I use the SSE2 edition which seems to be suitable to my Pentium 4 CPU with SSE2 instruction set at maximum. No browser or tab crashes, no problems with my USB hard disk which is currently connected.  At the moment, I am writing this comment from Thorium on my XP machine. 

[chermany4ever]

4 hours ago, AstroSkipper said:

Personally, I can't confirm that this browser is unstable. Thorium never crashed here and is very stable.

Here it freezes suddenly and does not react for several minutes. It also bothers me that I want to run it and just as it starts it shuts down 8 times out of 10.

[AstroSkipper]

38 minutes ago, Dave-H said:

I've now put Thorium on the XP side of my very underpowered netbook, and that's very unstable.
It opens fine, but trying to do anything often just produces a crashed tab with a 'status_access_violation' error.
If I keep trying, however, the tab always eventually opens, and once the tab is open, it seems to be perfectly stable.
Very odd!

Which version of the Chrome XP API Adapter do you use for Thorium?  The most recent one is 1.2.0.5057.

[AstroSkipper]

2 minutes ago, chermany4ever said:

Here it freezes suddenly and does not react for several minutes. It also bothers me that I want to run it and just as it starts it shuts down 8 times out of 10.

What are you hardware specs? And which version of Thorium and the Chrome XP API Adapter do you use? 

[NotHereToPlayGames]

1 hour ago, UCyborg said:

Both are buggy in fonts department (from disappearing fonts to incorrect rendering).

I guess technically I've never used either of them for more then four minutes at a time, lol.

I do know that Thorium can last for four minutes.  And Supermium only takes forty seconds or so to totally CRASH my single-core XP to the point of UNPLUGGING IT (it's an old laptop that doesn't even have a battery anymore).

I've not seen any font issues in those four minutes, but that window wouldn't exactly be a good test case.

[AstroSkipper]

1 hour ago, UCyborg said:

Thorium specifically is useless for Google Drive here as well, tab crashes as soon as I'm in.

No problems here in Thorium. I have just logged into my Google account and Google Drive opens fine here. No crashes to observe. All seems to be normal. And it runs surprisingly quite fast on my old machine. 

Edited May 27, 2024 by AstroSkipper
Update of content

[Dave-H]

1 hour ago, AstroSkipper said:

Which version of the Chrome XP API Adapter do you use for Thorium?  The most recent one is 1.2.0.5057.

I'm using version 1.2.0.5035 on Thorium and Supermium.
I will try updating it.

[AstroSkipper]

15 minutes ago, Dave-H said:

I'm using version 1.2.0.5035 on Thorium and Supermium.
I will try updating it.

When I started my test phase with the Thorium browser, the browser start was slow and the page loading behaviour was beyond good and evil. But for some time now, it has been running better and better on my old computer and one of the main reasons was the permanent improvement of the Chrome XP API Adapter. And on the other hand, all the time-consuming configuration work I did, of course.  I think this is necessary on old, weak computers under Windows XP.

Edited May 28, 2024 by AstroSkipper
Update of content

[chermany4ever]

3 hours ago, AstroSkipper said:

What are you hardware specs? And which version of Thorium and the Chrome XP API Adapter do you use?

I attach an image with the specs. The Thorium version is Thorium SSE2 122.0.6261.168. I don't know what the API Adapter is but I can tell you that it's the default with that version because obviously I haven't touched anything.

[D.Draker]

10 hours ago, UCyborg said:

Thorium and Supermium manage to destabilize my XP's USB stack to the point it's not detecting things being unplugged and plugged until the browser is closed. 

I too have this issue related to USB in both. Any simple USB stick is not detected when one of either browsers is opened. 2009 motherboard. USB 2.0.

[D.Draker]

10 hours ago, UCyborg said:

Both are buggy in fonts department (from disappearing fonts to incorrect rendering).

For me, using --no-sandbox helps to solve it, but I don't want to run without sandbox. So using these browsers is currently on hold. Also, due to the brightness issue.

[UCyborg]

1 hour ago, D.Draker said:

For me, using --no-sandbox helps to solve it

I know about that workaround, but it shouldn't be required. I can also confirm @NotHereToPlayGames's observation that it tends to occur with sites specifying font sizes in em rather than px. I noticed discussion a while back on GitHub about potential GDI issues, but I don't know if they got anywhere.

Also, version 122.0.6261.168, after testing on different computers, I've came to the conclusion that both SSE2 and SSE3 versions actually crash everywhere for me on Google Drive, Win10, Win11, Win XP, doesn't matter, on multiple different computers. Tested with clean profile, no settings were changed, no extensions installed, just opened the browser and went straight to Google Drive.

1 hour ago, D.Draker said:

I too have this issue related to USB in both. Any simple USB stick is not detected when one of either browsers is opened. 2009 motherboard. USB 2.0.

Hey, my motherboard's from 2008.

I do wonder if updating XP x64 beyond the year 2012 would help with anything. Though that would take more effort than I'm willing to invest at this point since my XP refuses to update by usual means after installing Legacy Update. Even tried with an old backup of XP installation from few years back. Who knows what's wrong with it, 'been pretty careful with it as I am with other OS installations.

The only other idea I have, I used to turn off advanced text services back in the day, this turns off ctfmon.exe. Seems like a long shot, but since both Thorium and Supermium mess with USB despite their actual USB functions being completely non-functional on XP...

Edited May 28, 2024 by UCyborg

[AstroSkipper]

6 hours ago, chermany4ever said:

I attach an image with the specs. The Thorium version is Thorium SSE2 122.0.6261.168. I don't know what the API Adapter is but I can tell you that it's the default with that version because obviously I haven't touched anything.

Ok. Your hardware is much more powerful than mine. You are using the same Thorium release as I do. The first measure you can do is updating the Chrome XP API Adapter which you can get here: https://github.com/IDA-RE-things/Chrome-xp-api-adapter/releases