Tag: Chrome 64

If your organization has Hangouts Meet or Chrome for Meetings hardware, there is a new update rolling out to you.  The Chrome 64 update for these hardware solutions has been released, taking you up to build Stable Channel Chrome OS release but has the Huddly firmware which is updated to 1.2.10.

For those that aren’t familiar with these two solutions, they are physical hardware packaged solutions that run on Chrome OS designed for conferences and meeting rooms.  They are available to G Suite customers in the Education, Business and Enterprise versions of the platform.

A long awaited feature has finally come to Chrome OS.  In the latest stable build of the platform, Chrome 64, the ability to rename external drives connected to your Chromebook has been enabled.  Now when you are in the File app, you can press ctrl+enter to rename the drive.

The ability to rename external drives is something that I first saw in a commit way back in August of last year.  The commit indicated that this shortcut would be coming but it wasn’t clear when exactly it would land on the platform.  This was not available to me on my Pixelbook under Chrome 63 so it looks like yesterday’s build release enabled it.

In the latest stable channel build for Android, Chrome 64, there is a new automatic URL shorter for those long, unwieldily URLs from shopping sites and other locations.  The new feature was uncovered by the team over at Android Police and should make sharing of URLs a little bit easier.

The new feature is used when you use the Share feature in Chrome for Android.  When you share a URL or copy it to the clipboard, a smaller version of the URL copied.  You can then share it with whatever apps or contacts as you would normally.

Progressive Web Apps, or PWAs, are the next big trend in browsing tech.  Designed to give an app-like experience on the web, PWAs are something that Google has been pushing hard as well as Apple and Microsoft.  All three companies, as well as Firefox are all planning to roll out support for the technology this year but Google appears to have the jump.

With Chrome 64, you have the ability to change flags within the browser to enable Progress Web Apps.  While technically not support – generally most flag settings are officially supported – it does work and you can give it a try to see what all the hubbub is about before it gets here in full swing later this year.  In this How To, I’ll show you which flags to enable to try out a PWA experience.

A small, incremental update to Chrome OS has been released that should be landing on everyone’s devices over the course of the next week or so.  The new version remains in the Chrome 64 train and is build 64.0.3282.144 (Platform version: 10176.68.0).

The release notes on this new build are pretty limited, indicating that it addresses several bug and security issues with the first Chrome 64 build released for Chrome OS earlier this month.  To check if the update is available for your system, type chrome://help in the browser bar and check for the update.  The release notes do indicate that systems with Android app support won’t see it for another few days yet.

The much anticipated update to Chrome 64 has arrived in the Chrome OS Stable channel.  The new version is build 64.0.3282.134 (Platform version: 10176.65.0) and it contains several new features along with the normal bug fixes and security updates that come with every new build of Chrome OS.

Here is the rundown of the new features in this build:

• Take screenshots faster on Chromebooks with a 360-degree hinge by pressing the power and volume down buttons at the same time
• Revamped Intent Picker for Play Applications (Same window by default with override)
• Lockscreen Performance Improvements
• Enable VPN for Google Play Apps
• Enhancements to our protected media pipeline for Android
• Android Container Auto Update Optimizations
• Touchscreen pairing settings

In addition to these new features, there is now a flag you can set to enabled split screen viewing.  This was something that was found in a commit last month.  Android apps can now run in the background too.