Google’s Chrome OS platform has many strengths, chief among them the affordability making it possible for just about anyone to get their hands on a laptop for use with school, work, or anything else. Chrome OS is also relatively simple to use and doesn’t have a very steep learning curve to it, but it does have its faults, such as the means for checking storage space on the device. In its current state storage management is fairly limited and not only does it not provide you with much information, it isn’t very easy to navigate to. A change seems to be on the horizon though as Google looks set to add a storage management feature to the platform in the near future.
Announced today via Google+, Chrome’s Francois Beaufort detailed the news on the upcoming system for managing your space. The new feature, which is already being tested in the latest dev channel update allows users to see how much space is left on their device, but more than that it also lets you view what is taking up space, so you can see how much storage space is being used up by stuff like downloads and Google Drive files that are being stored for offline use.
While this hasn’t rolled out to the stable channel just yet, those who are interested in checking it out can already give it a try by enabling the experimental chrome flag, chrome://flags/#enable-storage-manager. Once that flag has been enabled, a restart of Chrome is required, then all users have to do from that point is open up the Chrome settings and click on the Storage button that can be found in the “Device” section of the Chromebook or Chrome OS desktop. Once the feature actually goes live it should end up appearing like the image below, which shows total capacity, what’s in use out of that capacity, how much space is being taken up by downloads and offline files, and finally what’s available. While this may not seem like much, it’s going to prove to be a very useful feature now that Android apps have come to Chrome OS through the addition of the Play Store, as users will start to install more apps than before.