Tag: Chrome

It has taken nearly a year to arrive but Chrome is finally available in VR on the Google Daydream headset.  The news came earlier today from Google and so long as you have the latest version of Chrome for Android, you can strap  on your Daydream headset and you will see Chrome as an app available to use.

Google actually started working on Chrome in VR way back with the Chrome 61 release.  That was back in September 2017 and to this point has only worked in the Chrome for Android Canary and Dev versions of the app.

Google has announced a change that will impact how Chrome or Google account stored credit card information is accessed for online payments.  Beginning in Chrome 70, Google is requiring sites to link the PaymentRequests API to Google Pay to access this information.  This is due to Google moving to the standards based Payment Handler API in Chrome 68, which was just released this week.  That API allows browsers to link with digital payment providers, which Google now supports through Chrome and Google Pay.

With the announcement, it means that developers and sites will need to be updated by October 16th.  That is the day that Chrome 70 is expected to be released to the various stable channels.

Another new build of Chrome 68 has arrived in the form of an update to the Chrome for Android Beta app.  The new build is 68.0.3440.70 for those keeping score at home.  This new update marks the fifth Chrome 68-based build for the Beta app in this current cycle.

For readers who may not know, anyone can download and install the Chrome for Android Beta app from the Play Store.  No registration is required and you can have both the stable version and the beta version on your phone at the same time.  Just keep in mind that the key word in all of this is “beta” so you could run into bugs or other odd behavior with the app as it goes through testing.

Just in case you missed it, fundamentally because I certainly did, Spotify has released their Progressive Web App in Chrome and it is pretty darn good.  Like other PWAs, you install it from the menu in Chrome 67 or later while on the Spotify web player page.  This will install the app on your laptop so you can quickly access it with a single click.

For those of you who may not know what a Progressive Web App is exactly, it is a web page in an app-like experience.  The idea being that you can install it instead of a full fledged app to and get that experience.  Chrome 67 introduced support for Progressive Web Apps and you can install them in Chrome OS and other platforms.

If there was any doubt that Google is planning to make Linux available on a wide range of Chromebooks, a find by XDA Developers should put them to rest.  The code snippet found in a Chromium commit has added 18 new Apollo Lake powered Chromebooks to Project Crostini, the codename for the project to add Linux to Chrome OS.

The new additions are Chromebooks from the likes of Acer, Dell, and Lenovo, offering a much broader group of devices that will be able to run Linux and, notably, not the upper end of processing power.

One of the more anticipated features of Android Messages, the texting app from Google, has been Messages for Web.  As the name implies, it links Messages on your phone with your laptop to allow you to send and receive text messages without having to touch your phone.  Google has flipped the switch and the new site for the feature is live.

Navigating to the Messages for Web site walks you through the instructions to link your phone to the site via a QR code.  You scan that QR code within the Android Messages app under the overflow (three vertical dots) menu.