Chrome Canary for Developers | Hacker News Reader

Chrome Canary for Developers

paulirish.com

86 pointsbenackles37 comments

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?

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.

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.

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).

There are also daily builds of Chromium for Linux: http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-con...

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.

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.

switch out DOWNLOAD_URL = "http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-con...

with

DOWNLOAD_URL = "http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-con...

for x86.

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

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

awesome!

are these built by the chromium team?

yup.

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)

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.

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.

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

This sounds like heaven, where can I find more about this?

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

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?

I thought this was a great primer on Chrome Canary:

http://jtaby.com/2012/04/23/modern-web-development-part-1.ht...

Thanks for this!

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.

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.

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

Alternatively, you can needlessly spend time fixing a bug in Canary which doesn't exist in stable and will in fact go away before release.

It goes both ways.

I've worked with devs who used Canary as their default browser. Two bugs during my time with them were bounced back with "Cannot reproduce." This was because they were using Canary.

In another instance, though, a dev tested in Canary and fixed a bug on a site before it hit the users.

This is my experience – sometimes I fix/work around bugs before users get them, sometimes you have to accept a site is broken in Canary, but you know it won't be in the stable builds.

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.

Yup, happens to me every once in a while. As recently as a few hours ago. Canary completely bonked and I couldn't get anything to work in it. Had to close it and use FF instead.

At work, I test in Chrome and do the rest of my normal tasking stuff (check email, listen to music) in Canary. At home, most of the stuff I build, I use Canary exclusively.

But I agree, sometimes the updates tend to be sketchy at times.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Or try Chrome multiple users.

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