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Google Chromium 4.0, the pre-alpha version of Chrome, may still be buggy and crashy as all hell, but it’s also incredibly fast, according to benchmarks: 34 per cent faster than Safari, for one, and more than twice as fast as Firefox.

These numbers are based on Javascript benchmarks, which don’t give a total view of a browser’s speed but do tell us how adept a browser is at dealing with intensive code. Chromium scored 657ms on the test to Safari’s 886ms. Firefox scored 1508ms and Opera 10 Beta 3 (my personal browser of choice) lagged way behind with 5958ms. Keeping in mind that Chromium is pre-alpha and thus better seen as a fun dev project than an actual candidate for a primary browser, we’re pretty excited. Once Google irons out the bugs and gets some damn extensions, Chrome on Mac is going to be a stiff challenger to Firefox. [CNET]