14 DAY TRIAL // Right on cue, the first signs of Google Chrome 16 are here. There's no official release yet, but the open source Chromium builds are now labeled as Chromium 16.0.877.0. Google Chrome 16 is still some time away, since Google Chrome 15 is still in the dev channel.
Earlier this week, the build that would become Google Chrome 15 stable, 15.0.874.x, has landed. While it's still in the dev channel, the team is putting the finishing touches and squashing the biggest bugs before moving the branch to the beta channel.
At that point, Google Chrome 16 will enter the dev channel, but that's still at least a week away. In the meantime, if you really need the very latest, the daily Chromium builds are for you.
Google Chrome follows a rapid release cycle, with a new major version coming out every six weeks. To get to that point though, each version starts out in the dev channel, several weeks later graduates to the beta channel and several weeks after that lands in the stable channel.
New features and big changes land while the browser channel, everything after that, is focused on stability and bug fixes.
Google Chrome 16 should be landing as a Canary build soon too. That said, don't expect to see many or even any changes between Chrome 15 and Chrome 16 just yet, it's only a version number change.
It's only starting now that Chrome 16 will take shape, over the next month and a half or so, and new features will be added, gradually, during this time.
Google Chrome 15, in the meantime, is complete in terms of features. No new ones will be added until it reaches the stable channel, several weeks from now, but some features may get pulled if they don't prove reliable enough to be rolled out to millions of users.