Google Chrome is not officially available for Linux yet but pre-alpha Linux builds of chromium (which Google Chrome is based on) are already available for download and to play with. Google tries its best to persuade you from trying it out or even blogging about it. Like that will stop us from writing about it.

Just to be clear, this is NOT Crossover Chromium, but native Linux builds of chromium.

If you are brave, you can download the 575MB (tarred) Chromium source and build it yourself or you can download debian packages from here. As expected, this pre-alpha build is not quite ready yet; but as far as rendering JavaScript and websites  are concerned its very fast. Even cold startup is a lot snappier with Chrome (I mean chromium). Sunspider Javascript benchmark shows chromium to be 4x faster than Firefox stable release. Chrome windows build is however twice as fast as chromium pre-alpha Linux build.

But I guess Google doesn’t want us to write about it. :)

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