 So I have a few browsers open at the moment. I'm testing two browsers that are very interesting. They make claims of being the fastest browsers on the planet Earth. Now when I heard this claim in various YouTube videos over the course of the last two or three weeks, I was pretty skeptical. If only because how are you measuring these things, what are you comparing them to? And whenever a company or a developer or whatever makes a claim about being the best of anything. I'm always going to have to be skeptical because how, how would you know, right? How do you know that there's not some random person out there who has a browser that they didn't ever share that's faster than yours? I mean, you can possibly know that also people say things that they don't necessarily have the proof for all the time. And you just kind of have to be cynical about these things. But I wanted to try them because if you're saying your browser is prefaced, maybe it is. And how would I know without trying it? So today we're going to be taking a look at thorium browser. It is supposedly the fastest browser on earth. But before we jump in, if you'd leave a thumbs up on this video, I'd really appreciate it. It would really help the channel. So let's take a look at thorium and we'll talk about it. So this is here is thorium. And if you're saying it while that looks like Google Chrome, well, that's because it is a chromium based browser and it is a fork of chromium. They've done some tweaks to make this both faster and supposedly quote unquote more private. Now let's talk about the privacy stuff right off the bat, because I just want to get it out of the way. This is not the most private browser you're going to find in the world. Not even close. It still has all of the Google hooks and pinnings in it. So if you want to go up here to the profile thing and you want to sign in, you can still sign in with your Google account. You can't even do that in regular chromium. Here you can. So all the Google stuff, including the Chrome Web Store and all that stuff is still baked right into this browser. It's not gone. And as far as I can tell, actually, you can't actually get rid of any of that stuff. Now supposedly they've added some privacy and security stuff here. I don't know what's different here compared to regular chromium. But to be honest with you, if you're downloading this browser, you're not downloading it because it's the private browser. You're downloading it because it is the fastest browser. Now, when I decided I was going to do this video, I was thinking, Matt, how are you going to measure whether or not this browser is actually fast? Because in my in normal times, what I would do is just use my eye test. Right. I'd say, wow, that's fast compared to Firefox or compared to Vivaldi, whatever. But when you're talking about this kind of stuff, you want to be at least a little bit scientific about it. And that's what I decided I was going to try to do. But I found out that actually doing that in terms of scientific, you'd really have to use really big air quotes and if you wanted to use scientific, so what we're going to do is just kind of wing it a little bit. So what I decided to do was run this test here. Now, this test here, basically, what it does is it loads a web page with various web technologies on it over and over and over again over the course of a minute. And then you get a score at runs per minute at the end. So Thorium scores a score of 200 runs per minute. Now, if you just ran it on Thorium, you'd have no context to compare that to, right? So how does Firefox do? Well, Firefox scores a 115. Now, if you're thinking, wow, that's a big difference. That's because, wow, that is indeed a very big difference. And if you're a Firefox fan, you got to be thinking, that's, wow, right? Firefox is pretty slow. Now, let's be fair to Firefox. First off, this is just one test. We don't know how this test has optimized their technology for specific browsers, so we don't know if they've actually made it work as well as it possibly could on Firefox. It's possible that they only ever tested it on chromium-based browsers, and therefore Firefox kind of gets penalized, right? So that's a possibility. The reason why this particular test is scored in such a way. So we had to be fair about this thing and say that, yes, this is a really low score, but there may be contributing factors to that, right? But just we're just trying to compare them as much as we can. And if you were to just rely on this test, which is what we're going to do. Thorium browser gets a score of 200, Firefox 115. Now, my beloved Vivaldi gets a score of 152, depending on when I run it. So when I say depending on when I run it depends on how many tabs I have open. So at the moment, I have quite a few tabs open in another instance of Vivaldi. So this score here is probably not quite fair. The last time I ran it, it got 172. So it is less than thorium, but it's more than Firefox. So it's somewhere in the middle part of that. So that's Vivaldi. Now, the people who have developed thorium also have another project. So if you're not interested in using Chromium, which is by and large a Google project, you can use something called the Mercury browser. Now, I have also downloaded the Mercury browser. The Mercury browser is a compiler optimized, just like Thorium version of Firefox. Now, they don't make the claim of fastest browser on earth for Mercury, because obviously you can't have two fastest browsers on earth. So I ran this in Mercury, so I'm going to open up Mercury here and we'll actually run it again. I'll show this time. I'll show you the test on on camera here. So if I go to browserbench.org and hit start test, you can actually see how this runs. And basically what it does is that it runs the same website, but with different web technologies in the back, it runs about 480 different tests. All of them measuring how fast the page loads and completes the tasks on the page in a certain period of time. Now I will tell you this right now. Just the eye test, this runs way faster than the Vivaldi version does. It runs way, way faster than the regular Firefox does. It runs very, very close to what thorium does so much so that you can't really tell the difference. Now we'll see where the score actually ends up this time. It's almost done. And it gets a score of 174. Now that's actually lower than it was last time. The last time that I ran this, it got a score of 195, which was way closer to the 200 that thorium got. So it ranges between 170 and 200 for the Firefox version of this particular browser. So when it comes to speed, actually measuring the speed, there you go. Take that way as you will, right? Yes, of the browsers that I've tested, thorium is the fastest, mercury is about the second fastest. Vivaldi was pretty close in some of the tests that I ran to mercury. But again, we really can't rely on my Vivaldi test because I have a ton of stuff open in Vivaldi. So just again, grain of salt there just to let you know. So all of that is fine and dandy, but who really cares about a browser benchmark? To be honest with you, because when we use a browser, we're not using it because it has a high benchmark. We're using because we want to see the actual speed in our hands, right? We want to know that this is a fast browser and that it actually translates to time saved loading websites. And I've been using thorium now for a few hours. I've used mercury for a little bit. Obviously, I'm a longtime user of both Firefox and Vivaldi, and I've used regular Google Chrome in the past. And again, this is all going to be mostly my eye tests. So I suggest you actually download this and give it your own eye test. But for me personally, I can tell you that thorium is a very fast browser. Whether or not it's the fastest in the world, I don't know. I mean, you guys have to remember that my eyes are not great. Okay, so I wear glasses for a reason, but I also I'm one of those weird people who can't tell the difference between 4k and 1080p. So my judgment on these things may not be able to be trusted. But from my eye test, I would say that thorium is a fast browser. It is definitely faster than stock Firefox. It seems a little faster than Vivaldi, but not enough to notice to be honest to you all like across the board. Sometimes it seems faster. Sometimes it seems about the same. In terms of thorium versus the mercury browsers, they seem again about the same. So you can choose between the two of them if you'd rather use a fully open source browser based on Firefox, you can do that. If I were to go route, that's the direction I would go. It's just simply because I like some of the extensions that Firefox has to offer over Chrome. But that's beside the point. So pure eye test after doing the benchmarks and using it for a little while, I would say that yes, thorium is a very fast browser. Now you guys have to be thinking, Matt, why make this video? This is just a chromium based video that has a browser that's a little bit faster than the rest. That's true. That's 100% true. And the reason why I make this, this video is because people are seeing these videos across YouTube over the course of the last three weeks, you've seen like Chris Titus Tech made a video about thorium, a couple others have made videos about thorium in the Linux spear just alone. And then if you broaden that out into the rest of the tech space, you've seen, you've probably seen several videos on this. And I wanted to talk instead about the merits of something like this. Because making a browser is hard, right? We know that it's hard because there's not a lot of them out there that are doing things that are differently. There's a reason why Microsoft didn't want to make their own browser anymore instead they forked chromium and have made Microsoft Edge based on chromium. There's a reason why browsers like Vivaldi and Duck Duck Go and all the others, all of them based themselves on chromium because making your own engine to run underneath and control things in your browser is astonishing hard. It's astonishingly resource intensive. And it's just not something that many corporations have the resources to do or have the will or necessary interest in doing. So they base it off something that exists and there's a reason why we have all of these chromium based browsers out there, right? Because it's good. A lot of people use it and it's it's the underlining pinnings of it, at least our open source so you can take it and make your own and do a few features on top of it. So the majority of the hard work is actually done for you. So Vivaldi is a good example of this. They've taken chromium and built a whole bunch of features on top of it in terms of UI and stuff like that. But they've focused their development efforts on making the stuff on top of chromium the way that they want it. So we have another chromium based browser. We have another Firefox based browser with mercury. And basically what we have here is two forks that have optimized themselves in such a way that they're a little bit faster than the things that they're based on. So in terms of thorium, a little bit faster than chromium. In terms of mercury, actually quite a bit faster than Firefox. And then you get the benefits of the things that those are based on. So if you're using Firefox, you get all the stuff that Firefox has there. And you can benefit from the speed, but also have the benefits of Firefox. Same thing with the chromium. You can get all the chromium features that you want. And you also get the speed, but it comes at a compromise, right? First off, these things are developed by another person. So there's another person between you and the underlying project. Whether or not that's a person or team, I can't tell you. And you have to trust that person so that you're putting another person in between you and the your data in the hands of someone who develops it. And that's an extra developer between you and the base project. So that's one thing. Another thing is that if you take a look specifically at the mercury browser, it's based on 115.4, which is the ESR of Firefox. And we take a look at regular Firefox and we go up here to this and we take a look at help and then about Firefox. This is version one dot 18. So you're running mercury and Firefox, you're getting a older browser. Now that's not that big of a deal in terms, you know, a lot of people run the ESR version of Firefox, but you are going to be sacrificing some security patches there. Also, they're going to be doing the exact same thing on the thorium browser. So that's going to run a little bit behind the actual chromium project. So you're going to be getting older features. And specifically, you're going to be saying things like older security patches. So that's something to keep in mind when you're choosing between these. So we need to, yes, these are super fast browsers. There's no denying that. But they also have some downsides and you kind of have to keep that in mind as you are making your decision. And here's where I'm going to close out on this in my personal opinion on alternative browsers. When I make a decision on what browser to use, I don't make a choice on what it's based on. So at least not anymore. I used to be a solely a Firefox guy, right? I wanted to use Firefox because it was open source, Mozilla, despite what I often think of them, they do most of their stuff in the open source sphere. They seem to like Linux quite a lot. They do all the features and stuff that they develop, usually comes to Linux along the ride when they do their Windows versions and all this stuff. So I was a Firefox guy for a very long time. But then I decided that I wanted some extra features and gravitated towards Vivaldi because it had features. And that's how I choose the browser that I want to use. Not because it's the fastest, not because it is based on chromium or whatever, but because it has the features that I want to use. And that happens to be Vivaldi at this point, right? And I think that that right there is the way that most people should choose what browser they're going to use. Does it have the features that you want? So for most people, the answer to that question seems to be Chrome, Google Chrome. It has the features that they want. That's the reason why the vast majority of people use Google Chrome. That and of course, that it's very well marketed. But if you are thinking about switching to a different browser, what I would tell you to do is first off, try them, but also pay attention to more than just the claims that the browser developer makes. So if they're claiming to be the best browser in the world, you'd be the judge of that. Don't take their word for it. Don't take their word that it's the fastest ever and just go from there. Use the browsers and choose the one that you want. I think that's the way most people will make a decision and that's the proper way to do it. Now, in terms of thorium itself and mercury as well, my opinions on them are that they're fast browsers, but I don't notice the fastness as much because of the difference between Vivaldi and thorium as much as I would if I were still a Firefox user. If you're a standard Firefox user, I would be more tempted to switch to mercury than I am from Vivaldi to thorium simply because there's a bigger gap there and it was definitely more noticeable than the gap between Vivaldi and thorium, right? So I guess it depends on where you are and how much time you're actually looking to spend. And like I said, just from my eye test, I could tell that thorium was faster, but it wasn't a ton faster than Vivaldi. It was way faster than regular Firefox. And I could tell that mercury was also way faster than regular Firefox. So they are faster. The question is, do they provide the features that you want them to have? At the end of the day, you're just going to have to decide whether or not the speed is worth it to switch from one browser to the other. So those are the two browsers that I was looking at today. I know that this is probably the least scientific thing ever because I was talking about eye tests and I'm going to try to put some b-roll in the video as well of me just going to regular websites so you can kind of see the difference between the browsers as I browse around. And I decided to do that off-camera instead of doing it live like this just so I could be a little more controlled about it. But I'm going to try to do that as well so you can kind of see how things are going. So hopefully I did a good job of explaining that. But again, it's not going to be scientific. So what I would tell you to do is don't take a random Linux nerd YouTuber's opinion on any of this stuff. Go try the browser if you're interested in trying the browser. If you're interested in the market for something new or you want to try something new, I'd try it. Especially if you're on like Arch and it's easy to install. The instructions on the website, especially for Thorium, are for Ubuntu only. They have like a PPA or something like that. I don't know if they have like a, I'm assuming they have like a tar ball or something that you could download if you're on a different distro. Me personally, I installed it through Distrobox because Distrobox is awesome. And there for you who are using the bingo card, Distrobox has been mentioned. Anyways, that's it for this video. If you have thoughts on Thorium or Mercury, you can leave those in the comment section below. I'd love to hear from you. You can follow me on MasterDown or Odyssey. Those links will be in the video description. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash Linuxcast where you can head on over to the store where you'll find hats, t-shirts, desk mats and all sorts of stuff. All that stuff goes directly towards helping the channel. You can find that at shop.thelinuxcast.org. Thanks to everybody who does support me on Patreon and YouTube. You guys are all absolutely amazing. Without you, the challenges would not be anywhere near where it is right now. So thank you so very, very much for your support. I truly do appreciate it. And once again, I know that there are brand new patrons that have signed up. And a few of you who have changed to different levels as well. I'm once again behind. So I'm working on that and I'll have that fixed during the next couple days. So thanks everybody for your support. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.