thechromesource – Google Chrome and Chrome OS News and Forum

Review: Chrome Canary – More Than One Browser Instance

Posted on 25. Jul, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey in Reviews

I had recently written a post at the Chromium-discuss Google Group about a recent problem I was having with Chrome instances.

The pace of Chrome’s development is mind blowing. So when I read the Chromium-dev Group news about Chrome Canary, I was happy that the team is allowing more instances of the browser to be run for those of us who have a keen interest in Chrome.

However, does Chrome really need to have a stable, beta, dev and now Canary release? Under normal browser conditions, it does not. But because the pace of releases are being sped up due to Chrome being implemented as an OS as well as an integral part of Google’s TV initiative, it makes sense.

The real purpose is to put a canary build out that can be frequently updated, and possibly rolled back. The Chromium team realizes that the more eyes that are on their early builds, the faster potential problems can be worked out, thus speeding up the development life cycle. Note that this build is currently only available for Windows users.

When I first installed Chrome Canary, I was surprised to see that I was given a choice for which search engine would be queried when I put a term in the omnibox. Actually since Yahoo how uses Bing for search results there’s really only two options here.

Looking at the versions of these two instances, it appears that for now the two are running the same build so there’s really nothing intriguing to report on about canary for the time being. Although canary will only be used to push the more risky features into the build, we’ll keep updating on any of the most interesting changes.

Tags: Bing, Chrome 6, Chrome beta, Chrome Canary, Chrome canary build, Chrome dev, Chrome development cycle, Chrome OS, Chrome releases, Chrome stable, Chromium, Google TV, Yahoo