Chrome OS 88 is officially available to all users and with this update came a set of useful new features, such as the search for tabs and the new screen saver for the Chromebook. While there are many new gems to play with, there are some hidden features in Chrome OS 88 that you can activate with very little effort and take advantage of and add to the Chromebook toolbox. We covered each of these features at some point as they moved from the Canary channel, but now you can enable each of them on the Stable channel at the touch of a button. Robby put together a quick video to highlight these hidden features and show you how to activate them now in Chrome OS 88. Take a look.
Enabling flags
Warnings apply here. To access these new features, you’ll need to enable “experimental” flags on your Chrome OS device. You can do this by going to chrome://flags on your Chromebook or Chromebox. Remember that they are experimental and, as you can see on the flags page, this comes with a warning. These flags, in particular, have been tested by our team on numerous occasions and we use some of them regularly. They are very stable and appear to be working as the developers intended. That said, you can feel a hiccup here or there. If you think one of these flags is unstable, just go back to the Chrome flags page and select “reset everything” to set everything back to the default. When enabling or disabling a flag, remember to save any work you may have opened, as Chrome will ask you to restart your browser and anything you have opened will be lost. Prepare? Okay, continuing.
Scan tool
Printing has come a long way on Chrome OS in recent years, but Google has recognized the need for more integrated features for all-in-one devices. The ability to scan from a Chromebook once required installing an Android app or accessing the printer’s IP address, and even then, the results were right or wrong. With the new scanning UI, any printer connected to the network that works with your Chromebook and is able to scan now will appear as an option for scanning documents. I tried this on a handful of HP printers, as well as on an Epson and it works great. There is still a lot of work to be done before users save to PDF, but for now, you can still save your scans as an image file. The scanning tool still recognizes the options available for your specific printer, such as DPI options and whether or not you have a table, feeder, or both. To activate the new scanning tool, go to chrome://flags and search for “UI scanning”. Alternatively, you can simply point your browser to chrome://flags/#scanning-ui and then restart Chrome. Your verification tool will now appear in your application launcher and in the system settings menu.
Reading List
When the “read later” or reading list feature first appeared, we weren’t sure what would differentiate it from the traditional bookmarks we see in the Chrome browser. However, this practical little add-on is really useful for adding content to a saved space to be consumed later, without messing up the Chrome bookmarks bar. With this flag enabled, you can click on the favorite star icon in Omnibox or go to the bookmarks tab in Chrome settings and you will now have the option to create a bookmark or add it to your reading list. Once added to the reading list, it is a quick way to return to saved web pages and mark them as read or simply delete them to remove them from the list. To enable it, go to the Chrome flags page and search for “reading list” or point your browser to chrome://flags/read-later. Restart your browser and you now have a nice little folder on the right side of your bookmarks bar.
Screen capture test
We’ve been tracking the new Chrome OS screen capture and recording tool for months, but Google has finally made an official announcement about the feature. In an effort to better equip educators and students, the revamped screen capture tool will begin rolling out with the next major update to Chrome OS, scheduled for early March. The new screen capture tool adds a ton of new functionality to the integrated screen capture feature that we’re familiar with in Chrome OS. Once activated, the traditional Ctrl + F4 (overview key) will still take a full screen capture, but pressing the partial screen capture key will present you with a new set of tools.
You can now move your screenshot and resize it to get exactly what you want in the image, instead of having to crop the photo at the end. Most importantly, the new tool offers the ability to make screen recordings of your entire screen, select windows and even make partial recordings of a specific section of the screen. If you go to the Chrome flags page and search for “screenshot,” you’ll see the flag. You can also point your browser to chrome://flags/#screen-capture and it will be right on the top front and center for you to activate. Enable this flag, restart Chrome and now your new screen capture tool is ready at your command.
These tools hidden in Chrome OS 88 are exceptional resources for improving your workflow and I recommend trying them out if you need these types of tools regularly. It will take a little over a month before we see Chrome OS 89 arrive on the Stable channel, but we are expecting a lot of new features and I am sure we will find some more hidden features that you may be interested in trying out. Stay tuned.