A Touch of Yellow

Yesterday, Google announced the availability of Google Chrome Canary for Mac. The Canary is a version of Chrome that’s updated very frequently—in most cases, daily. It offers the absolute latest version of Chrome, closest to what most developers are working on. It’s the first place to see new features, bug fixes, and other changes to Chrome. It’s also entirely untested, so it might not even launch, and if it does launch, it might work so badly that you’d wish it hadn’t.

This version of Chrome has been available for Windows since last August, and it joins the dev, beta, and stable Chrome channels on the Mac. These channels allow users to choose whether to run a very well-tested and well-supported but older version of Chrome, labeled the stable channel, a more recent (and fun) version like the Canary, or something in between. Dev (short for developer) channel releases usually come weekly and are minimally tested so that users are spared major brokenness. The beta channel is tested more thoroughly and is used to stabilize releases before they’re promoted to the stable channel.

Early Warning

The Canary is actually an important part of Chrome’s strategy in that it enables the six-week “release early, release often” schedule to work as well as it does. By getting a Chrome update out to Canary users daily, the amount of time we wait for feedback is dramatically reduced. If a new feature causes Chrome to crash frequently, we’ll know about it within a day of turning that feature on. If an engineer fixes that crash, we’ll have validation that the fix works within a day of making the repair.

The rapid feedback provided by Canary users was the inspiration for its name. The Chrome Canary is our equivalent of a canary in a coal mine, which would show signs of oxygen deprivation or gas poisoning as an early warning to workers that a hazardous condition existed. When a hazardous condition exists in Chrome, the Canary will warn us about it long before we’ll find out from dev, beta, or stable channel users.

Like the other Chrome channels, Canary feedback comes in two ways: from bug reports entered by users, and from usage statistics and crash reports that Chrome provides automatically. One difference between the Canary and the other channels is that in the Canary, the checkbox to enable these automatic reporting features is on by default. (The option is always presented at installation time.)

Silvery Metallic

In a sense, the Canary builds are similar to the existing Chromium snapshots that some users are running. Chromium snapshots are produced automatically, approximately hourly, and are also entirely untested. Chromium snapshots don’t include any of the automatic reporting that the Canary does, so we were missing an important feedback channel when users chose to run Chromium instead of a version of Chrome. The Chromium snapshots also don’t include any automatic updater, which has prompted some to devise their own mechanisms to keep up-to-date. There are other differences between Chromium and Google Chrome, but the Canary intends to remain true to Google Chrome as closely as possible.

Monochromacy

There are a few areas where the Canary intentionally differs from Chrome’s existing dev, beta, and stable builds. As mentioned above, automatic usage statistics and crash reporting are enabled by default in the Canary, emphasizing its role as part of a feedback-gathering system. The Canary can also be installed alongside any other version of Chrome, providing a sort of escape hatch: if the Canary ever winds up unusable, just use a non-Canary version of Chrome for a few days. In fact, the Canary uses a completely different set of settings than any other Chrome installation, so you can run both of them simultaneously, and they won’t interfere with one another.

The Canary can’t be set as your default browser. That’s the official line, anyway, and the features in Chrome that allow it to offer to set itself as the default browser have been disabled in the Canary. Practically, all this means is that when you click on a web link in another application, it’ll open in some other browser, not the Canary. I’ll let you in on a little secret, though: if you’ve installed the Canary on your Mac and really want to use it as your default browser, you can set it as the default web browser in Safari’s preferences. The irony of invoking another web browser to make this work isn’t lost on me, but sometimes, you’ve just got to swallow your pride for a moment to get what you want.

How It’s Done

At the nittiest and grittiest level, producing the Canary is just a minor twist on Chrome’s established build process. When we build Google Chrome, it doesn’t have any idea what sort of channel it’s going to be released to, or whether it’s going to be a Canary. It just knows it’s Google Chrome. The specialization happens at the very end of the process. A script takes these “undifferentiated” but complete builds of Google Chrome, makes a few copies of them, and then makes the necessary changes in the copies to turn them into dev channel builds or Canaries or whatever else is called for.

Many of these changes occur in the browser application’s Info.plist. In the case of the Canary, specialization means that the automatic updater will be configured to treat the Canary as a distinct product from Google Chrome so that the two can coexist side-by-side. This is done by setting KSProductID to com.google.Chrome.canary instead of com.google.Chrome. A similar change is made to CFBundleIdentifier so that Mac OS X doesn’t get confused between Google Chrome and the Canary. The Canary has a setting named CrProductDirName, which is set to Google/Chrome Canary, and the auto-updater is set to use the canary channel by setting KSChannelID to canary. The colorful application and document icons are replaced with yellow ones, the managed preferences manifest is tweaked and renamed corresponding to the other changes that were made, and that’s it. Ding! It’s done, and ready to be released to users without any further delay.

Notably, there’s absolutely no difference in code anywhere between the Canary and other channels of Google Chrome. The side-by-side feature is enabled by basing the location to store settings on CrProductDirName. In every other way that the Canary needs to vary from the other channels, it’s handled by looking at KSChannelID.

Since there’s no difference between Chrome and its Canary, if you ever wound up with a dev channel build of Chrome whose version number is identical to a Canary’s, you could compare their versioned directories and you’d find that they’re 100% identical. If you’re interested in trying this experiment, the stars should align properly for you once a week.

Running Simultaneously

If you want to run Chrome and the Canary side-by-side, you might benefit from these tips. Having the Canary operate out of an entirely different group of settings than other Chrome builds is part of what enables the two to run simultaneously, but it can also be frustrating if you’ve amassed a large collection of bookmarks, extensions, or other settings. If you enable Sync in each, they’ll share data, while maintaining their distinct presences on your hard drive.

If you find that you’re running both Chrome and the Canary simultaneously and need a way to distinguish them, consider giving each a different theme to provide some visual distinction. Personally, I’d go with something heavy on the yellows for the Canary.

How Do I Choose?

Chrome Stable, Chrome Beta, Chrome Dev, Canary, and Chromium. Still not sure which to choose, even in spite of my warnings of gas poisoning?

Handle this like you’d handle the purchase of a new car. Just pick by color.