The Google Chrome we know and love is a browser that simply works. It renders JavaScript at insanely fast speeds and keeps itself up to date without us even noticing. It has superb stability and handles system resources better than most browsers on the market. But it takes a lot of work to get to there — five distinct development trees, to be exact. 
 
What many people don't realize is that Chrome is just the beginning, the first branch on a very large tree of code that spans numerous development milestones. There's the Chrome that people use and on a daily basis, and then there's everything else. The good stuff — like Android link push and extension sync — doesn't always make it into the stable builds as early as we'd like, and until it does, Chrome's many development branches are the place to find them. 

From Chromium to Canary, here's how Google's development tree works, and where you'll need to go to get your bleeding edge browser fix. 

Chromium snapshot builds 

This is as bleeding edge as you can get when it comes to pre-release builds, and the least stable of all development trees. Here, changes are introduced on a daily basis, fixing some things, while breaking others, and serves as the testing ground for more stable Chrome releases. As the name implies, a snapshot is taken each night at regular intervals, so depending on the state of the codebase, it's very likely things won't work. It's important to note that Chromium in this state isn't actually "officially" Chrome; instead, it serves as an open-source development project upon which Chrome is based. That means things like Flash and h.264 decoding aren't included by default — something to keep in mind when watching all those double rainbow parodies on YouTube.

Canary builds

Introduced just last week, Canary is considered to be a mix of Google's developer and Chromium snapshot builds. This is the most bleeding edge of the official Chrome builds available to users, but has a number of noticeable differences and improvements over the nightly releases. Like other Chrome builds, Canary is updated automatically, sometimes as fast as the nightly builds are posted. But perhaps more importantly, Canary can operate independently from other Chrome installs, making it an ideal test platform for those who want to try out the most recent features and fixes — assuming things are stable enough, of course. Keep in mind, Canary is Windows-only for now, but Mac and Linux are sure to follow soon.

Developer builds

This branch has been around since Chrome's inception, and offers a more stable testbed for developers to work on extensions and other aspects of Chrome development. Once certain features move from the experimental testing stages, they begin to appear in the development branch for bug fixing and improvements, with the eventual goal of becoming full-featured parts of a stable Chrome release. It's important to note that the differences between platforms and features become more apparent here; extension support was previously missing from Mac and Linux builds from quite some time, and extension sync seems to be the same.

Beta releases

As Google describes it, the beta branch allows users to "try out the newest tools while they're a little rough around the edges." Features that appear in beta builds are now officially part of the Chrome roadmap, but require a wider user test base to ensure they are ready for prime-time. Stability for core components is usually not an issue here, but tread carefully where new features and settings are concerned.

Stable releases

Finally, this is the release of Chrome that most are familiar with, and probably the one with which you're reading this right now. Available for all platforms from the Google homepage, the official release of Chrome includes all those fancy features like browser sync, automatic updates and plug-in support that we've come to expect. Not much to see here — you know what to expect. 
 
Lead image via Flickr user casasroger.