Chrome Canary

You can run synthetic tests in Chrome Beta and Chrome Canary. This allows you to see how upcoming browser changes can affect the performance of your pages – for better or for worse!

How to test with Chrome Beta or Chrome Canary

You can test with Chrome Beta or Chrome Canary by creating custom browser profiles. This can be done by clicking the Edit Browsers button in your SpeedCurve Settings, and then clicking the Add a custom browser profile link at the bottom of the page.

On the custom browser page, change the browser engine to be either Chrome Beta or Chrome Canary.

If you want to match the profile settings to any of our default browser profiles, you can find the default settings in our browsers & devices documentation.

Once you've configured the test profile, click the Add button.

How will Chrome Canary affect my metrics?

Unfortunately there's no easy answer to this. A good place to start is the Web Vitals Changelog, which lists the upcoming and past changes in Chrome that affect the Web Vitals metrics. Other changes could affect things like the order or priority of network requests and JavaScript execution time. It's also possible that your metrics aren't affected at all!

My Chrome Canary metrics look wrong. Is this a bug?

Chrome Canary is considered unstable, and it's possible that there are unexpected changes or bugs that have a significant impact on your metrics. If you find any issues running your tests with Chrome Canary, please let us know by sending an email to [email protected]

Should I use Chrome Canary to run all of my tests?

We don't recommend running Chrome Canary as your only browser. Instead, we recommend running Chrome Canary alongside your stable Chrome tests. This will help you spot upcoming changes to your metrics before new versions of Chrome are rolled out to all of your users.

What's the difference between Chrome Beta and Chrome Canary?

Chrome Beta is typically one version ahead of Chrome Stable, whereas Chrome Canary can be up to two versions ahead. We recommend checking the Chrome Platform Status to check which version is in each branch.