Thorium Browser

It wanted to do what Google Chrome couldn't, particularly because it skimmed away the needless bloat and wrote over what was needed to give it that speed boost. Really helped the browsing experience! Unlike the other forks, though, the immense amount of code change means updates are slow and therefore risky. It made its history in its early years, but now has fallen from grace in the latter considering. It still has a chance in coming back swinging should the updates come more often.

Thorium runs well, but you can't whitelist cookies. That means that cleaning cookies becomes mostly all-or-none. Yes, you can block third party cookies. Yes, you can pick and choose which individual cookies to keep and remove ongoing, but that gets old quickly. Brave and some other browsers have that same cookie issue, but at least there's a work-around for Brave with the program CCleaner. I've checked if CCleaner picks up on Thorium's cookies, and it does not, even if the Chrome Cookie option is checked. Maybe there's some hidden privacy blessing in this, I'm not sure. Another consideration is that Thorium seems to be heavy/ take up space. I cleaned the cache and it still seems heavy.

It's fast, but while looking at the passwords I found an easyminer.

Trojan:Win32/Znyonm (downloaded 'via' majorgeeks, but they usually good, one would think, right? glhf) Affected items: clsid: HKCU@S-1-5-21-4215594890-417352412-1681236807-1001\SOFTWARE\CLASSES\CLSID\{635EFA6F-08D6-4EC9-BD14-8A0FDE975159} file: C:\Users\...\AppData\Local\Thorium\Application\123.0.6312.133\notification_helper.exe regkey: HKCU@S-1-5-21-4215594890-417352412-1681236807-1001\SOFTWARE\CLASSES\CLSID\{635EFA6F-08D6-4EC9-BD14-8A0FDE975159}

the AV is windows defender

It's based on Chromium, so to the trash it goes.