Google Chrome is no doubt the most popular and widely used browser by the masses, which is available across a multitude of platforms. Not only is it accessible widely, but is available for download via four traditional channels, namely Stable, Beta, Dev and Canary.
Stable version is the finished iteration of the product that has been launched after rigourous testing, whereas Dev and Beta version are a little crude and buggy as compared to the former. But, Canary, it is the most bleeding-edge version of Chrome among these four variations.
This means that the Canary is extremely — extremely — buggy, and unstable as compared to other variations. It is primarily intended for use by developers and early adopters who’re interested in checking out changes the moment they’re introduced to the browser.
The Canary builds have previously only been available for testing on Mac and Windows, but the Chrome team is today debuting the Android version of the unstable browser as well. It contain a day’s worth of work and introduces a handful of bug fixes alongwith a variety of new features, and enhancements to the performance. But, one can still expect it to stop working entirely at any time of day — due to some unknown issue.
However, the goal is for Canary to remain usable at all times, and the Chrome team prioritizes fixing major issues as quickly as possible,
says Google engineer Alex Mineer in the official blogpost.
So, Canary version is an unstable test build which is automatically shipped with recent updates every weekday, and sometimes even on weekends. Due to frequency of builds released to update the app, the process could typically consume an extensive amount of data. But, you’ll now become the human guinea pigs who’ll be the first to get their hands of new features.
You don’t need to let go of the trusty stable variant of Chrome on Android, but you can install Chrome Canary for the thrill of it.
