One of the great things about products that Google produces is that many of them are available through open source. This means that anyone can have the code and manipulate it for their own preferences. Businesses do this as well. Google’s Android OS for smartphones is open sourced, which means that a lot of companies use it on their phones, but each one is a little different according to what works best for that particular phone.
Well, Chrome is the same way. Besides Chrome there’s Chromium — the open-sourced version of Chrome. What’s also nice is you can choose whether you’re included as one of the testers for new versions of Chrome. If you want to be the first to try out all new changes, then you can be part of the Canary group (think coal mines. Yep, you’re that type of canary). This group is updated on a daily basis and sometimes the changes could break Chrome.
The next group is the Dev Channel. This group gets updates a couple times a week and although the changes are tested, they are usually buggy and will require work to get them ironed out.
The third group is the Beta Channel. This group gets updated about once a week and receives major updates about every six weeks. People in this group receive updates that are fairly stable, but will get major updates as much as a month before typical users in the Stable Channel.
The last group is the Stable Channel. This is where most people are.
