What's New In Chrome OS 33

Since I briefly talked about the features in  part 9 of the Living with the Acer C720 series Chrome OS 33 has gone to the stable channel in the form of Version 33.0.1750.124.

What's changed in Chrome OS 33 stable

In the stable release of Chrome OS 33 the new full Screen mode that was present in the beta version has made its way to the stable, Google Now seems to be somewhat missing from the stable release even though there is a Google Now flag in chrome://flags, but it seems to be hard disabled as even when it's enabled Google Now doesn't work even though I've got it set up on my Samsung Galaxy SIII Mini, Asus Google Nexus 7 and iPhone 4S. I'm wondering if Google Now in Chrome OS has been omitted from the stable release due to it being a bit buggy with its location reporting, as when I was using the beta release of Chrome OS 33 reported on occasions that I was in Manchester or Birmingham, which is a bit strange when WiFi Location reporting is usually quite good.

A nice addition that's going to be helpful to new Chrome OS users is the first run tour. The first run tour is an interactive tour of Chrome OS that overlays info on the key parts of Chrome OS onto the Desktop.

Another new feature of Chrome OS 33 is Contacts search right from within the search bar on the top of the app drawer. This feature is a nice idea, but if you're like me and use outlook.com for email a lot of your contacts will be stored on the outlook.com website then it's not going to be that much use. Also I've found that not all off my Google contacts show when I do a search.

Chrome OS 33 Conclusion

Chrome OS 33 is a minor improvement over Chrome OS 32. One thing from the change log for Chrome OS I've noticed that doesn't seem to work is the renaming of files in Google Drive in offline mode doesn't work as I fried that this morning and couldn't get it to work.

If Google re-introduce Google Now into a future release of Chrome OS 33 or a future build of Chrome OS, and sort out the reliability of renaming files in Google Drive in offline mode along with improve the Contacts search feature then Chrome OS could become a serious contender as an OS.

Roland