I looked over the patches for thorium, and a lot of it is really cool. Making the browser feel like an actual Linux first browser.

Though I also definitely agree with you on the issues. A chromium fork that out of date is pretty dangerous, though the risk is mitigated somewhat by using ublock (assuming you turn on all the security related filters). Thorium also has somewhat unique settings that can make it easy to fingerprint (for the privacy conscious folks).

Do you mean like a chrome profile that you can just download and put in the right place? That might be a good idea since it might be possible to make it browser agnostic.

Though some of the things like the deeper system integration wouldn't work. A literal set of browser patches also wouldn't really work since you have to compile the browser for each update. (Please correct me if I misunderstood what you were trying to say)

Fair enough, I can see that. That said, I don't think the browser would last long if they went this route. Mainly because I doubt most people have time to compile a browser with external patches.

Though if Thorium implemented an update feature that pulls the source and auto complies it, that might be more acceptable. This method would likely require some amount of automated testing to ensure nothing went wrong.