14 DAY TRIAL // Google Chrome is not your everyday browser, that’s much for certain. If not for its technology, at least for the way it does things. It’s UI was, in a sense, revolutionary at launch, and its release schedule is unique among browsers and very rare among all desktop apps. This is why, just a year and a half since the first beta, Google Chrome 6 is around the corner, coming quite possibly later this week.
Chromium 6, the open source project on which Google Chrome is built, has just landed in the daily builds directory. The full version number, at this point, is Chromium 6.0.400.0. The major version was changed a couple of days ago with the switch from 5.0.396.x to 6.0.396.0. Normally, a major version change for any browser would be a significant update. With Chrome and Chromium, the changes are minimal. In fact, the upgrade from .396 to the latest .400 brings very few changes or updates. The newer Chromium builds seemed to be a bit faster in JavaScript benchmarking.
Since Chromium is basically just Google Chrome with a different name, it shouldn’t be very long until Google Chrome 6 gets here. The latest Chrome version in the developer channel is 5.0.396.x, so the next release, which should be coming this week, will sport the 6.0 label. This also means that the newly released Google Chrome beta, the second beta with the 5.0 version, will be the last. The next Chrome beta will be based on a 6.0 build. The stable Windows build is still at 4.1.
Google Chrome was launched a little over a year and a half ago. During this time, Google has blazed through six version numbers. Chrome 2.0 was launched about a year ago. Since then, both 2.0 and 3.0 have been phased out. The 4.x release is living its final moments as well. For the user, this actually means very little. Chrome and Chromium are constantly evolving and, thanks to Google’s automatic update system, most users should be running the very latest version of whatever branch they have installed. Since Chrome has a silent upgrade system, you may not even be aware when it updates. You can find out more about Google Chrome version numbers and the differences between Chrome and Chromium here.
Chromium 6.0 is available for download here on Softpedia.