14 DAY TRIAL // Chrome users that want to get the latest features first run the dev channel builds. While these are generally less stable than the beta or the stable releases, they're the first to get the new features that Google is working on.
Well, almost the first, there's one Chrome that's even fresher and more experimental, the Chrome Canary build.
This special version of Chrome installs alongside the regular Chrome and acts as the frontline, new features get their first trial run in Canary before being shipped to dev.
There's another big reason for Canary, it gets updated as soon as Chromium, the cutting edge, open source version, gets updated.
The dev channel builds spend a couple of weeks during each six-week release cycle getting ready to make the switch to beta. During that time, no new features are added and bugs are ironed out.
But the core Chrome team doesn't sit idly by during that time, it's still working on new features and these features end up in Chrome Canary immediately.
As you can imagine, Canary builds have quite a small audience. So small, that Google only releases them for Windows.
But that's about to change, it looks like Chrome is working on enabling a Canary channel for Chrome OS. This does come with a few problems though.
Chrome Canary and any regular Chrome can be installed alongside each other on Windows. But that's not really going to be possible on Chrome OS, or at least it doesn't make much sense to.
In fact, it doesn't look like that's the case. Instead, users will be able to switch from the Canary channel to any of the other channels and back like they can now between dev, beta and stable.
"We're adding support for moving between all channels including canary-channel. We need the appids of the board in order to switch from canary to non-canary channel. Similarly, we need the canary-channel's appid in order to switch from non-canary to canary channel," the description of a proposed Chrome OS patch reads.