Since it was first announced, Google’s Chrome OS has come a long, long way from being “just a browser”. In fact, there are many people out there that can use Chrome OS as their default operating system quite happily, and this sort of trend only seems set to continue. More and more features are constantly being added to Chrome OS, turn your Chromebook off for a month or so and turn it back on and you could be forgiven for thinking you’ve had a major upgrade. Already throughout 2015 we’ve seen a new file browser design, a new sort of app and search launcher when pressing the search key and of course, Android app support (although fairly limited right now).
Chrome OS has long featured the ability to use more than one monitor, be that your Chromebook’s display and a second monitor or just two from one Chromebox. In the past however, this has been pretty limited, and you were bizarrely often limited to only using your Chromebook’s display resolution on the second monitor. Now though, Chrome OS is growing up once again, and in the latest Dev Channel update, a unified desktop of sorts has been added, finally joining those two displays together. This means that browser windows and such can finally span two displays at once. Fran§ois Beaufort, renowned member of the Chrome community, shared the news on Google+ and there’s a flag that needs to be enabled in order to try it out.
Beaufort notes that applications like Chrome Remote Desktop, which allows Chrome OS users to use their Mac or PC on Chrome, will take advantage of this new unified desktop. This new change goes a little further to give Chrome OS even more standalone prowess. For a long time now, people have thought of Chrome OS as basically a web browser, and while it’s still heavily dependent on the Internet – that’s basically the whole point – additions like these are steadily turning Chrome OS into a fully-fledged Desktop platform for today’s Internet.