Category: Chrome OS

Today’s Deal is a great opportunity to pick up the Goggle Pixelbook along with the Pixelbook Pen.  Right now at Amazon, you can pick up the combination of the two for $987.  That is less than what the Pixelbook along normally costs.  This is the lowest price for the combination that I’ve seen for the premium Chromebook since its release.

The price is for the Intel i5 powered unit with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage.  It is certainly powerful enough to do anything you would need, be it in Chrome OS or Android apps running on the device.

A third update to Chrome 66 has arrived in the Chrome OS Stable Channel today for the majority of devices out there.  Build 66.0.3359.181 (Platform version: 10452.96.0) arrives about 10 days after the second build of Chrome 66 was made available to Chrome OS.  It is not too often that a 3rd build is made available in the Stable Channel unless a show stopping bug or security flaw was found.  In this case, the Chromium team hasn’t released any details on what was addressed.

The update appears to be rolling out widely.  My Google Pixelbook was updated to the build late last night.

Somethings things just don’t go as planned and Chrome 66 could fall into that category.  The update to the browser for MacOS, Windows, Android, iOS, and Chrome OS rolled out progressively starting in late April up through last week depending on the platform.  It came with an autoplay blocking feature that would prevent most websites from autoplaying audio and video content.  The problem is, it broke things.

Specifically, multiple reports came to the Chromium team about web games being broken after the update to Chrome 66 as well as some corporate web-based demos.  In response, Google has partially rolled back the feature with plans to reintroduce it later.

It looks like that Android app access to USB drives in Chrome OS is a little bit closer than anticipated.  When I wrote about this feature coming to Chrome OS back in April, it looked like the feature would land in the Chrome 68 build which isn’t due until July.  However, in the latest Chrome 67 build for the Chrome OS Beta Channel, the feature is available and SD cards or USB drives show up as a storage option.

The feature is a big deal for those who use Android apps in Chrome OS.  It means that you can store documents, music or videos on an external drive and not eat up what is often a small amount of built-in storage on your Chromebook.

As the Chromium team within Google continues to prep the next release of Chrome OS, a new build of Chrome 67 has arrived in the Chrome OS Beta Channel.  Build 67.0.3396.41 (Platform version: 10575.32.0) is now available for devices and is the second Chrome 67 based build to be available to testers with devices in the channel.

As a reminder to those new to Chrome OS, the Beta Channel is the last stop before a build gets released to the publicly used Stable Channel.  Chrome 67 is expected to be released on our around June 5, 2018.  That means we likely have a couple of more beta builds coming before it is released.

After being first released last week, a second Chrome 66 build is now available in the Chrome OS Stable Channel today.  Build 66.0.3359.158 (Platform version: 10452.85.0) is available for most Chrome OS devices starting today and is the build that systems which are capable of running Android apps will be updated to run.

I can confirm that my Google Pixelbook was updated to build .158 earlier this morning when I used the chrome://help command to check for the update.