Detect which release channel (stable,unstable,dev) from JavaScript

Question

I'd like to be able to detect which release channel of ChromeOS or Chrome a user is in from inside my chrome platform app. Is there any way to do this? The information is in chrome://version

navigator.appVersion of course gives which major chrome version I'm running. I would be fine with having to make an XHR to some webpage that lists the current ChromeOS versions. But I cannot find such a table anywhere. It would be nice if it were on http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/

Answer 1

What exactly are you trying to do? Tying app behavior to a channel is an anti-pattern, as the channels are constantly evolving. If you are interested in restricting functionality to a specific new feature, then use minimum_chrome_version in your manifest, or if you don't want to restrict availability of your product during the (generally) brief window between dev and stable, simply parse navigator.userAgent (or navigator.appVersion, as you say) for the Chrome version, then switch your app's behavior based on whether you're before or at the version you need for the functionality in question.

Again, don't require a specific channel. It frustrates users and is a maintenance headache for you.

Answer 2

You can probably use http://omahaproxy.appspot.com/. The main page has a table mapping versions to channels, and the "data feeds" section has machine-readable (CSV and JSON) versions of the same data.