Here come the shouts of version jumping, ladies and gentlemen: Google has pushed the Chromium browser to version 6. If you’re keeping tabs, the first publicly available version of Google Chrome arrived on September 1, 2008. About a year and a half later, they’re 5 versions deep.
It’s not as if Google just randomly decides when they want to bump the version number. Google has clearly documented reasons for why they make the change. Typically it’s when major changes to either WebKit or the V8 JavaScript engine are made. (edit: Chromium v6 appears to have bumped WebKit to v 58855, which was released about 5 days ago). Still, I wonder if Chrome will hit version 9 before Internet Explorer does.
And hey, it’s just a number — right? To you and me, yes.
To the general computing public, though, bigger still means better — and the average Joe just might be more receptive to a Chrome browser with a 6 after it than Firefox with a 3.
6 is twice is good as 3, right?
Builds stamped V6 are only available on the Chromium buildbot server right now — but you’ll be seeing the change in the Dev Channel as soon as update scheduled for tomorrow. We’ll have a look at the changelog once it’s posted.
