The Chrome OS team rolled out the 100th version of its lightweight operating system today, and as a result, brought quite a few interesting changes to the platform. The most obvious is the new launcher, which has been moved from the bottom of the screen to the side and has gained some new features. The built-in camera app also now lets you save your creations as GIFs, and Chrome OS’s dictation feature now makes it easier to edit text.
Also new is support for over 100 additional devices with the newly introduced Chrome OS Flex. For developers, Google is rolling out a redesigned ChromeOS.dev site. The launcher is probably the first thing users notice. Note that the taskbar itself isn’t moving, we’re just talking about the Chrome OS equivalent of the Windows start menu.
The design idea is to leave more room for other windows that are open. Users can now organize their apps by name or color, or manually arrange them in any order they think makes sense or do nothing at all. Inside the launcher, Google has updated its search function, which previously showed a short preview of search results.
After this update, you’ll see quite a bit of information, even before going into the browser. Shortcuts are now also integrated into this search experience, so taking screenshots is now easy too. The GIF creation feature in the Chromebook’s camera can create a five-second GIF.
As for the upgraded voice editing experience, it’s definitely what you’d expect. For example, you can now say “delete” to delete the last letter, or “move to the next character” to move the cursor. Pretty straightforward enough that one has to wonder why these features weren’t available before, but definitely a very useful addition for users who rely on dictation.
