

Chrome Canary for Developers - benackles
http://paulirish.com/2012/chrome-canary-for-developers/

======
pdknsk
Chrome has 150k reported bugs.

I'd be more interested in using Canaray (or the Linux equivalent) to help with
Chrome development if Google actually fixed reported bugs. Most bug reports
these days aren't even acknowledged by Google, let alone fixed. Surely Google
has enough money to hire someone full time to at least read and label incoming
bug reports. Even acknowledged bugs are just moved from milestone to milestone
now, until someone puts the milestone-x label on it, which basically means: If
you don't fix this, we won't.

The bug tracker has a vast amount of unrecognised duplicates. This is Google.
They cannot detect likely duplicates?

~~~
lambda
They've fixed all of the bugs I've reported to them.

They are a popular software product, with a public bug tracker. They are
likely to get more bug reports than they can deal with. Every software project
gets more bug reports than they can deal with. I have never found a software
project in which there weren't people who were unhappy with how quickly they
fix or respond to bugs. Could they hire someone to sort through their bug
tracker, or hook it up to an analysis engine to look for potential duplicates?
Maybe. But that would be a lot of time and money spent, for not much gain.

I don't see Chrome as being much worse than any other random project you can
name; and in fact, their automated testing is good enough that I am
comfortable running their Dev Channel browser as my primary browser, and have
run into very few problems doing so. Once or twice it broke for a few days in
ways that I never tracked down to report, but was fixed within a week; and
there have been a couple of bugs that I have reported that have also been
fixed within a week or two. I've been running Dev channel as my primary
browser for about 3 years now, with no show-stopping bugs, and only a handful
of minor ones.

~~~
wanderr
They fixed the bug we reported too, one day later! It's possible they already
had a fix in the works, but we were surprised at the quick turnaround
nonetheless.

------
velodrome
I wish they had Google Canary for Linux. Right now, you can only pick a single
channel for chrome (Stable, Beta, or Development). There really is no side by
side chrome running. You can use chromium but it really is not the same thing
(as it is usually a few versions behind chrome stable and lacks a few
features).

~~~
jarek-foksa
There are also daily builds of Chromium for Linux:
[http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-
con...](http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-
continuous/index.html)

You can launch it without installation (just unzip the archive). I think there
were daily builds of Chrome as well, but I can't recall the link.

~~~
ch0wn
I use this script to automatically update to the latest stable (test-green)
Chromium build: <https://gist.github.com/2049083>

It actually just downloads and unpacks the latest version and keeps a backup
of the previous release, but I found it quite handy. Be sure to adjust the
path, though, if you want to use it.

~~~
autotravis
switch out DOWNLOAD_URL = "[http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-
browser-con...](http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-
continuous/Linux_x64/{0}/chrome-linux.zip)

with

DOWNLOAD_URL = "[http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-
con...](http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-
continuous/Linux/{0}/chrome-linux.zip)

for x86.

ssshhhh... don't tell anyone i'm 32-bit

~~~
ch0wn
I added a check to the script for that case. :)

~~~
autotravis
awesome!

------
rodh257
I recently discovered a good reason to be running Canary/dev channel. Chrome
version 22 introduced a bug with heavy JSON pages, where navigating away from
them would lock up the browser. Our page had been working great on all
browsers, then literally on the morning we went live, Chrome 22 was pushed out
to auto-update, which broke this page for our users. If we had of been running
Canary, we'd have seen the issue earlier in the development process.

(this is the issue by the way -
<http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=155270>)

------
dylanz
Canary is great for AngularJS development as well, as it's a test bed for
things like Batarang and the AngularJS inspector before it's shipped to
stable.

~~~
sheldor
Sadly one of the latest versions of Canary broke Batarang and I had to switch
back to stable.

That said, since I got used to Chrome and Canary for development and switched
from Firefox and the memory-hungry / leaky Firebug I never looked back.

~~~
cheriot
Batarang only works with Chrome's Dev channel for me right now.

------
Zirro
Nightly is the equivalent for Firefox and it can be found here:
<http://nightly.mozilla.org>

------
melling
I've been running the Canary build for over a year now. It has worked well for
me. Plus, I get the added satisfaction of helping to build a better browser,
just by surfing the web. :-)

Btw, I keep both Chrome and Firefox Nightly's open all the time, doing a
restart daily to get the updates.

Shouldn't almost everyone in a group like HN be helping to crowd source
testing for these two browsers?

------
sgoraya
I thought this was a great primer on Chrome Canary:

[http://jtaby.com/2012/04/23/modern-web-development-
part-1.ht...](http://jtaby.com/2012/04/23/modern-web-development-part-1.html)

~~~
krat0sprakhar
Thanks for this!

------
tholman
Is this really practical for the average front end developer. Appart from the
dev tool upgrades (which are awesome, I'll admit) I only forsee spending extra
time fixing features that may exist in canary, but aren't supported by other
browsers. Rendering differences between different versions of chrome and
general browser degradation problems.

~~~
recuter
The flip side being that you can needlessly spend time fixing a bug in Chrome
stable only to have it go away on its own in the next version.

So is it really practical to develop in canary? Possibly. Try it.

~~~
swampthing
Once you've figured out it's a bug in Chrome stable, you can generally look to
see if there's a bug report and track its status:

<http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/list>

------
mrharrison
I feel like I'm on the bleeding edge already with just normal Chrome. They
push new updates all the time that break sites and change commands that
disrupt my flow. Anybody else have this problem? I hope they can keep the
bleeding edge to Canary and resolve all issues till they push to the standard
chrome version. It would be nice to have the choice of being on the bleeding
edge or not. That said, I love chrome and all of its tools. Thanks Chrome dev
team.

~~~
wmf
They can't resolve issues that they don't know about, and the only way to
discover issues early is to run Canary or beta.

------
lallouz
I've been using Canary for dev for a while. I would suggest to have both the
shipped and alpha builds of Chrome open at all times. While Canary gives you
some nice features early on, it is still considered unstable and you don't
want to be testing in an unstable environment. I love using it to dev, but
then I always switch back and test everything in prod chrome.

------
danabramov
Just a couple of days ago I wished there were styled console.logs. Turns out,
they are already in Canary, and I didn't know about it. Sweet.

------
jorts
I love Canary, although if you plan to use it be prepared for it to be more
error prone than Chrome stable. I use it extensively while working in Windows.

------
HoLyVieR
Just out of curiosity is there any difference with "Chrome Developper channel"
and "Chrome Canary" in term of available features ?

~~~
richbradshaw
Canary is ahead of Dev, so sometimes there are exciting new things, but mainly
it's a mixture of either more or less buggy.

------
jamipolo12
I saw this earlier, I am excited about it now.

------
danso
I think I'll use this solely as another browser to segregate cookies from oft
visited sites (i.e. Facebook). Safari in 10.8 is practically unbearable these
days

~~~
wmf
Or try Chrome multiple users.

