Google is rolling out ChromeOS 117 to Chromebooks with several new features, including Material You design, a customizable window-switching panel and the ability to join video calls directly from the calendar view.
The company is bringing customizable Material You design to Chromebooks. After selecting a wallpaper and a color palette, these settings will be reflected in areas such as quick settings, desktop and window head bars. ChromeOS 117 also has a redesigned quick settings menu with bigger buttons and slider bars — akin to the slide-down settings menu on Android 13 on Pixel phones.
Image Credits: Screenshot by TechCrunch
The new update also brings a new window organizer. You can arrange windows by pressing the Everything button + Z or by hovering over the “Maximize” icon on an app window. After that, you can put apps into split, partial and full views or make them float over a window.
ChromeOS already has a quick access to the calendar view from the bottom bar — now you can join a meeting with a click of a button from that view.
Image Credits: Google
The update also brings adaptive charging, which will supposedly improve battery life. You can enable it through Settings > Device > Power > Adaptive charging. When you turn this feature on, your Chromebook will charge to 80%, and then use machine learning to figure out your unplugging habits to charge it to 100% slowly.
Image Credits: Google
With ChromeOS 117, users also get some useful features like the ability to pick shared albums from Google Photos for rotating wallpapers, the ability to search GIFs from the emoji picker (via 9to5Google), support for time-lapse recording through the webcam and the ability to view information such as RAM, Power and OS version in search results on the launcher.