Well, I was planning to write an article about the many new labs features in Google Chrome’s dev and Canary channels. But after I returned home to my personal laptop after more than 2 months, my Chrome Canary browser wouldn’t stop crashing, immediately after starting up. I found that strange, because I didn't have any problems with it on the work laptop, in fact I used it every day – except for the couple of days when an update broke the LastPass login and I had to switch to Firefox.
So I went for the universal solution for crashing software: uninstall it and try a fresh install from the Internet. Except in Control Panel, I noticed something unexpected: the version number listed for Chrome Canary was 8.0.549.0 – in the time it took me to fly back from Munich, Chrome launched a new major version! 
Unfortunately, I can’t say a lot about the new features – I didn’t get to see any because of the constant crashes, both on Windows 7 and on XP. One thing that could be new is a nice desktop notification I got before even starting any of the Chrome versions on the laptop, saying something like “A new version of Chrome is available, would you like to try it now?”. I think it’s built in the Google updater that runs in the background. I didn’t take a screenshot, but it could pop up later – I expect a new minor version pretty soon to fix all these crashes on Windows.
2 comments:
It's nothing special. The stable branch for Chrome 7 is about to be released, so Google bumped the version number to work on Chrome 8.
Chrome X is a work in progress until Google releases the first beta version. The new features will first show up in Chromium, then in Canary and the Dev Channel. When the Dev Channel branch is almost ready for primetime, Google releases it in the Beta Channel, fixes the bugs reported by users and pushes the updated build to the stable channel.
I'm just surprised nobody noticed this before me. :)
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