For those of you who are brave enough to operate your Chromebook using the Dev Channel, we have some good news for you. According to Fran§ois Beaufort of Google, you can now open password protected .zip files on your Chromebook. This has been one of the more asked for features for the Chrome OS, and it looks like Google has finally got around to implementing this feature. Many people use password protected .zip files to keep information and files safe while sending them via email, for example. With this new feature, you will no longer have to find other means to open these files. The feature will also allow you to store the password in case you will be using it frequently.
As stated, this feature is available for the Chrome OS Dev Channel so consider it experimental and it may still have a few bugs to be worked out. If you are not currently on the Dev Channel or are not familiar with it, you should take caution if you decide to switch over to try out this new feature. The Dev Channel can be very unstable and you may possibly experience less than desirable performance issues or possible data loss. For those of you still willing to take the plunge you should first make a backup of your data or make sure everything is secure and safe just in case disaster happens. The next step is to change over from the stable version to the Dev Channel. To do this, all you have to do is type “Chrome://help” then go to more info > change channel > Developer – unstable. Again I want to stress that a whole lot of things can go wrong if you do not have a clear understanding of what you are about to do. I would suggest taking the time to research and educate yourself on the fine points of making this choice and the ramifications that it may entail.
Chrome OS has filled out to become more and more capable as time goes on. As things continue to improve, we will see more features such as this added that will make this system even more capable. If you use the Dev Channel in Chrome OS frequently, you will no doubt appreciate this addition. No more transferring to other devices or having to use other software to handle your needs. Now you can do so right from the OS itself without having to take additional steps. One point of note, you can decrypt the .zip file, but according to Fran§ois Beaufort in the comment section, you may not encrypt a .zip file. Hopefully. we will see this feature added soon.