Google Chrome now provides a way for people to get early access releases automatically.

http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel/

http://groups.google.com/group/chromium-announce/browse_thread/thread/8d58ecef26f30d5e/fa365b3075ce75d2?show_docid=fa365b3075ce75d2

the name of the exe is chromechannel-1.0 but when you run it the versionnumber is 1.1 :)

For Chromium, you can get 10 or more updates daily. Most of them aren't significant and some of them introduce new bugs, but at least you're living on the edge.

The latest Chrome update on the Dev channel breaks update :-)

Yup, same with me. I used the channel switcher to switch to the Dev channel, updated to the latest Dev release with no problem except that I no longer can update at all. The "About Chrome" just sits their spinning it's little arrow. If you shut down Chrome after closing the "About Chrome" dialog box, Chrome's "browser" processor stays running and has to be killed manually using either Windows Task Manager or, in my case, SysInternals' Process Explorer.

This is the latest Dev version I updated to:

Google Chrome 0.2.152.1 (Official Build 2164)
WebKit 525.19
V8 0.3.0
User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.152.1 Safari/525.19

If anyone knows how to fix this without having to uninstall Chrome and reinstall the original beta release I'd sure appreciate the info.

Reading the instructions on http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel/ clearly states:

"n Google Chrome, click the wrench menu and choose About Google Chrome.
Note: On Windows Vista, updates from the About box require Service Pack 1. With 0.2.149.29 (the current release), on demand updates do not work in Vista SP1 if User Account Control is disabled."

Guessing that's your problem, as I had the same problem as you...
Enabling User Account Control should fix it...

what if you're using windows XP?

In the latest Chromium release, Google says they stopped adding https-based sites to the searchable history. "Previously, this
searchable history included the text from secure sites, such as your
online bank (any sites using SSL for security). Google Chrome no
longer saves text from secure pages in its local history. The address
bar and local history search page will no longer find data from secure sites you have visited."

Furthermore, Google say they stopped sending certain sensitive URLs to the search suggest service:

<<Google Chrome stops sending data to a suggest service if the typed URL: contains a username:password field (http:// username:passwordexample.com/) has query parameters (the trailing ?param=data following the URL) is an https URL with any path component (any part following the hostname, such as /path in https: //www.example.com/path)>>