Chrome Gets a “Canary Build” – Because Weekly Updates are Just too Slow

Since its launch 2 years ago, Google Chrome always offered three different builds of its increasingly popular browser: stable, beta and developer. While regular users could always stay with the stable build, early adopters could opt for the beta and developer channel. The developer channel features weekly updates, while beta channel users only see and update or two per month. Starting today, however, Google will also offer more frequent updates through the Google Chrome Canary Build channel.

It’s worth noting that this channel will run separately from your regular Chrome install (and you can install and use both in parallel). As Google notes, these new builds are “highly unstable browser that will often break entirely.”[ref]these updates should come close to daily[/ref]

A few more interesting things to note:

• for the time being, the Canary Build is available for Windows only
• the Canary Build can’t be set as the default browser
• upon installing, the installer will ask you if you want to set Google, Bing or Yahoo as your default search engine

Overall, this looks like a smart extension of Google’s “launch early and often” strategy. It gives those who want to live on the cutting edge a chance to try out features before they become available to other users and gives Google’s engineers a way to gather even more feedback.