One point that doesn't seem to have been explained yet - mentioned in the OP article - is that Chrome OS has canary, dev, and beta channels prior to stable, wit

One point that doesn't seem to have been explained yet - mentioned in the OP article - is that Chrome OS has canary, dev, and beta channels prior to stable, with real users. For something like this to have happened without those non-stable channel users experiencing it, it seems like there must have been a code change that was pushed direct to the stable channel - which negates the purpose of the other channels in the first place. At the very least it seems like a severe process failure. I don't think the dev who changed the code is necessarily at fault - it's more a question of how it was allowed to get into the stable channel without going through the normal process.