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I am pleased whenever something is available that enables us to keep using stuff that’s considered obsolete without it.

In the case of expired Chromebooks (past their Automatic Update Expiration (AUE)), Chrome Canary is a state of the art, mostly for developers, alpha software browser release that allows users to continue using their Chromebooks with an updated browser beyond their AUE.

AUE means the time at which Chromebooks will no longer receive updates to ChromeOS and it’s built-in web browser.

Chromebooks and their browsers are typically intertwined, as the machines run on ChromeOS which includes the Chrome browser built in.

The “stuff” like Chrome Canary is bleeding edge, and not exactly ready for prime time or critical workflow use; the bugs are there, so if you need performance and stability, this apha Browser may not be appropriate for you.

That doesn’t deter guys like me, or any browser enthusiast for that matter, from taking Chrome Canary on test rides to all corners of the Internet.

Since Chrome Canary is a separate browser application, it is treated as just another application by Google’s Play Store. You can download it there and try it out yourself–whether or not you have a Chromebook that just so happens to be past its AUE.

First impressions compared to Lacros

Lacros, which is another Google Chrome browser is enabled via flags by visiting chrome://flags/ in the ChromeOS built-in browser. Without getting into too much detail, you have to enable Lacros by checking the boxes for it as either enabled, disabled, or default. Once you select the flags you want enabled for Lacros, your Chromebook will prompt you to restart.

Upon restart, the Lacros icon is present and available in the dock.

I really liked Lacros.

I say liked because like Chrome Canary, Lacros is a browser that is separate from the actual browser built in to ChromeOS. If you search for Lacros on the web, you start to understand that it is an experiment to separate the browser application in general from ChromeOS and make it a separate application like a calculator, word processor or media viewer.

With Lacros, it was just like the browser was there for me separately, and the ChromeOS and its underpinnings were in the back seat of the car, out of mind as it were.

I liked that, but there’s been a nagging issue I’ve been unable to solve. I have not been able to get Lacros to update. It’s stuck on the version I originally activated with the chrome://flags/ enabling process.

My inability to solve this problem led me back to try Chrome Canary.

The first thing that stands out is speed

Chrome Canary is much faster than my Chromebook’s ChromeOS built-in Chrome browser. That is no surprise since the ChromeOS built-in browser version has been stuck in time since last June when it reached its AUE, and is probably slowed down by virtue of this, and its being built in to the Chromebook’s ChromeOS.

Chrome Canary also seems to be faster to me than Lacros.

I, of course, perform no actual bench testing; it’s just my perception of snappiness and I understand it’s all relative depending on one’s experience.

Things like cut and paste are a little dodgy in Chrome Canary. This is to be expected from an alpha software release.

While I’d like to get Lycos updated to try it some more I am having fun surfing with Chrome Canary.

This kind of independent browser thinking is pleasing me to no end.

I never liked the idea of expiration dates for Chromebooks. These are computers, not cartons of milk.

We should be able to use our hardware as long as we have adequate CPU, graphics, and memory resources.

Sure, things will eventually slow down over time, but I can attest that applications that are separate from ChromeOS that you can run on your Chromebook will be the wave of the future.

Also, I’m not entirely positive, but I’m pretty sure that Google will benefit from this financially as well, once the browser piece of ChromeOS is no longer intertwined with the operating system.