14 DAY TRIAL // It’s difficult to make sense of Google Chrome’s different releases as it is, but the development team is now adding another build to the mix. Intended for early, early adopters, Google Chrome Canary Builds are more experimental than the dev channel releases. The first Canary Builds were made available a little over a week ago, but Google is only now making the formal announcement.
“[A] few days ago, we released a new experimental version of Google Chrome called Google Chrome Canary Build. We plan to update the Canary Build more frequently than the Dev channel, with riskier changes, and usually without a human being ever verifying that it works, so the Canary Build is only for users who want to help test Google Chrome and are comfortable using a highly unstable browser that will often break entirely,” Henry Bridge, product manager for Google Chrome, wrote.
Recently, the Google Chrome team decided that the release cycle was somewhat slow. Stable releases are about three months apart and, while this is several time faster than most browsers or any other app out there, Google believed it could do better, two times better in fact, so it’s now pushing for about one and a half months between major stable versions.
This meant that the testing releases, the beta and the dev channel builds, would also have to come faster. Regularly, when the team is ready to move the dev branch builds to the beta channel, it starts releasing bug fixing updates until Chrome reaches a stable enough stage. Google is in the process of preparing for a beta build right now, with the latest Google Chrome 6.0.472.xx the likely candidate.
But, even as part of the team is ironing out the bugs, the rest of the developers are plowing ahead building new features. These features need to be tested and this is where the Canary Builds come in. While the dev channel builds are considered experimental, they go through a rather rigorous testing phase. Any long time dev channel user will tell you that, even though the builds are buggy at times, overall, they’re stable enough for regular use.
This won’t be the case with Canary Builds as they will be released more often and normally without any manual testing. It must be noted that Google has an even more experimental branch; the Chromium builds which are released several times a day, where the active development is done. Canary Builds will be somewhere between Chromium and the dev channel releases. In total, Google Chrome now comes in five flavours based on their stability, Stable, Beta, Dev, Canary Builds and Chromium.
Due to their experimental nature, Canary Builds can be installed alongside any of the regular versions of Google Chrome. Canary Builds are only available for Windows user for the moment, but Google says Linux and Mac versions will be made available if there is interest in them. “You can star the issues for Mac and Linux support, as well as the issue for default browser support to cast your vote and be notified of progress there,” Bridge explained.