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Sometime over the past week Google quietly increased the version number of its Chromium development browser to 4.0 and it is every bit as fast at rendering web pages as version 3.0 was.

Officially Google only releases its browser as Chrome, and it doesn’t actually have a Linux version available yet so many Linux users have yet to give Chrome a spin. But Google does also regularly release development versions of Chromium for Linux, Windows and Mac platforms which offers all the benefits of bleeding edge Chrome development without the assurance of a “stable” tag.

Earlier this month Google released a beta version of Chrome 3.0 for Windows and said that it was as much as 30% faster than any other browser. I haven’t had an opportunity to test Chrome 3.0 on Windows so I don’t know how true that is but I did test a Chromium 3.0 version on Linux and – here’s the thing – it is almost 50% faster than Firefox3.5 on the same platform at rendering web pages.

I ran Opera 9.63, Firefox 3.5 and Google Chromium 3x through the SunSpider Javascript test (http://www2.webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider.html). Firefox 3.5 turned in a very respectable 1766ms turn of speed. Which is enough to put it miles ahead of Opera’s sluggish 7613ms but not a patch on Google Chromium 3.0 which turned a score of 719ms. So, when it comes to rending pages it seems that Chrome has some legitimate claim to the fastest browser title.

Subsequently, however, a Chromium 4.0 version was released (I’m currently running version 4.0.204.0) and it is proving to be every bot as good as 3.0.

Instructions for installing Chromium builds on Linux can be found on the Chromium dev website. There are also a number of distro-specific builds available including for Ubuntu and Fedora.

Last Microsoft Internet Explorer posted its largest market share loss since November 2008, while Firefox reaped nearly all the benefit, gaining almost 1% according to Web metrics company Net Applications. Meanwhile, Google’s Chrome continued to gain on Apple’s Safari, closing to within 1.25%. At Chrome’s current pace, it will replace Safari as the number 3 browser within the year.

But it was the biggest browser by share, Internet Explorer (IE), that saw its numbers change the most in August, when it dropped 1.1% to 66.6%. The slide was IE’s steepest since last November, said Net Applications, when Microsoft’s browser plunged by 2%.

Full story at Computer World