Is there a way from within Google Chrome to know whether I'm running the stable, beta, or dev channel?
I was experiencing problems with recent dev releases and decided to go back to stable. Now I want to make sure it worked.
In "About Google Chrome" is says
14.0.835.186 m
Does that m stand for stable perhaps?
By the way I'm on Windows but I assume there's a platform-independent way to check?
Try chrome://version/
Regular Chrome says:
Google Chrome 14.0.835.186 (Official Build 101821) m
OS Windows
WebKit 535.1 (branches/chromium/835@94713)
JavaScript V8 3.4.14.21
Flash 10,3,183,10
User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/14.0.835.186 Safari/535.1
Command Line "C:\Documents and Settings\geek\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --flag-switches-begin --enable-print-preview --flag-switches-end
Executable Path C:\Documents and Settings\geek\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe
Profile Path C:\Documents and Settings\geek\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default
Chrome Beta says:
Google Chrome 14.0.835.186 (Official Build 101821) beta-m
OS Windows
WebKit 535.1 (branches/chromium/835@94713)
JavaScript V8 3.4.14.21
Flash 10,3,183,10
User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/14.0.835.186 Safari/535.1
Command Line "C:\Documents and Settings\geek\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --flag-switches-begin --enable-print-preview --flag-switches-end
Executable Path C:\Documents and Settings\geek\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe
Profile Path C:\Documents and Settings\geek\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default
Dev says:
Google Chrome 14.0.835.186 (Official Build 101821) dev-m
OS Windows
WebKit 535.1 (branches/chromium/835@94713)
JavaScript V8 3.4.14.21
Flash 10,3,183,10
User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/14.0.835.186 Safari/535.1
Command Line "C:\Documents and Settings\geek\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --flag-switches-begin --enable-print-preview --flag-switches-end
Executable Path C:\Documents and Settings\geek\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe
Profile Path C:\Documents and Settings\geek\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default
Canary says:
Google Chrome 16.0.891.0 (Official Build 102650) canary
OS Windows
WebKit 535.5 (@95897)
JavaScript V8 3.6.4
Flash 11,0,1,148
User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/535.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/16.0.891.0 Safari/535.5
Command Line "C:\Documents and Settings\geek\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome SxS\Application\chrome.exe" --flag-switches-begin --enable-print-preview --flag-switches-end
Executable Path C:\Documents and Settings\geek\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome SxS\Application\chrome.exe
Profile Path C:\Documents and Settings\geek\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome SxS\User Data\Default
Regular is m, Dev is dev-m and canary is canary
According to the official Chrome Release blog, your version is the latest stable version. I think if the version doesn't state either beta or dev, it's using the stable channel.
A little googling gives the following explanation of m flag.
// Return a human readable modifier for the version string, e.g.
// the channel (dev, beta, stable). Returns true if this operation
succeeded,
// on success, channel contains one of "", "unknown", "dev" or
"beta" (unless
// it is a multi-install product, in which case it will return "m",
// "unknown-m", "dev-m", or "beta-m").
static bool GetChromeChannel(bool system_install, std::wstring*
channel);
The "m" just means that you have multiple versions of Chrome installed in C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application. You might have multiple versions of Chrome if you didn't download the latest version, but updated to it. The new version won't replace the old one, in case of installation failures. So in essence, when Chrome detects that you have more than one version of Chrome, it displays "m" after the version number in the [About Google Chrome] window.
Source (in comments)
It appears as if you are on stable channel.
You can just check the About Google Chrome as you already have and look for "beta" and "dev" version keywords. I'm running the latest beta channel version (on Windows 7) and my "About Google Chrome" window says "beta-m". An image of something similar to what you should see can be seen at How-To Geek
if you installed it via adding it to sources.apt and doing apt-get install google-chrome, then:
doing:
cat /etc/apt/sources.list | grep 'dl.google.com'
will print
deb http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/ stable non-free
# this line is not output ^ look here for the channel
I found most googlable answers over the net rather misleading. The letter "m" solely appears when your Google Update entries exist in your registry but your Google Chrome auto-update is disabled.
If you go to chrome://chrome you'll get something like:
Version 30.0.1599.22 beta-m
As you can see, I'm running the beta version because it says 'beta'. The dev version would probably say something like 'dev-m' at the end. If you have neither, you're probably on the stable release.
