All clear, it should be safe to update your Chromebook

At the end of June, Google pushed out an incremental update to Chrome OS 91. Almost immediately, users learned that the update came with a nasty little bug that was taxing the CPU on a wide range of Intel and AMD-based devices. Shortly thereafter, the Chrome OS team rolled back the update server which allowed users to revert back to the previous version of Chrome OS with just a powerwash. Unfortunately, that temporary fix came with its own unforeseen side effects. If you “downgraded” to the older version, your device’s Linux container was useless if you were trying to launch it for the first time. Thankfully, our in-house cloud genius discovered a workaround for that little issue, and disabling a single flag quickly skirted the issue.

It is still unclear as to what was causing the issue and a quick look at the related bug report shows that developers haven’t “officially” marked the bug as fixed. That said, Google has pushed the latest version of Chrome OS back out to the update server and version 91.0.4472.147 began rolling out late last night to most Chrome OS devices that aren’t EOL. I took the update this morning and so far, everything appears to be working with no issue. All this to say, we should be in the clear to take the update to the latest version of Chrome OS. If you are unsure whether or not your device has the update available, simply head to the settings menu and click About Chrome OS. From there, smash that “check for updates” button and see what happens. Alternatively, you can head over to the device list on cros.tech and look for your device to see which version it should be on at the moment.

While I’m happy to see this update roll out and things working as they should, I find it very unusual that Google and its developers did little to actually acknowledge the problem. The bug report is still open and no one from the Chrome OS team has taken the time to reveal what was causing the bug. Not only that, the latest update is using the same version number as the previous one that caused the bug in the first place. I would think that a new version number would be in order if it contained a fix but when I look at the changelog, there’s nothing new when compared to the original rollout of version 91.0.4472.147. Anyway, it’s all a bit convoluted but for now, things appear to be good to go and you can confidently update your device.