The new ‘Floating Workspace’ feature is finally beginning to show up in ChromeOS Canary

For over a year and a half at this point, we’ve been on the lookout for a new turbo-charged sync ability on the way to ChromeOS called ‘Floating Workspace.’ Discovered all the way back in January of 2022, this new feature aims to take device sync to a whole new level.

At its core, ‘Floating Workspace’ will automatically restore the tabs and windows from one Chrome OS device to another based on recent activity. Imagine leaving work, heading home, and having your Chromebook at the house pick up precisely where you left off at the office – all without having to manually reopen apps, tabs, or windows. It sounds pretty awesome, right?

The likely impetus behind this feature stemmed from the growing trend of users who regularly switch between multiple ChromeOS devices on a daily basis: be it for work, school, or personal use. ‘Floating Workspace’ could one day bridge the gap and offer users a truly unified experience across multiple ChromeOS devices.

Signs of life for ‘Floating Workspace’

Although still in its developmental phase, we’re finally seeing ‘Floating Workspace’ come to life in the Canary Channel of ChromeOS 118. Behind a simple experimental flag, users can now turn it on and actually try out the cross-desktop feature for themselves. There’s still likely more work to be done on all of this, of course, but the fact that it is now showing up to try out signals a big step forward in seeing this new feature arrive in general for Chromebook users.

@michaelperrigo @robby_payne @GabrielBrangers @chromeunboxed @NexusBen
FIRST LOOK: Google's Floating Workspace feature for ChromeOS has finally appeared in Canary
Basically, it restores the windows, apps & tab that were open from a previous ChromeOS machine as seen below!
THREAD pic.twitter.com/3BvGanKmyd

— C2 Productions (@cr_c2cv) August 21, 2023

Thanks to C2 Productions on Twitter, we have our first looks at all of this in action, and the fact that it can actually be enabled and used right now tells me we shouldn’t be too far from seeing this one ship to Stable Channel Chromebooks.

If you’re brave enough to dabble in the Canary Channel of ChromeOS 118 (we don’t really recommend it for most users), you can give ‘Floating Workspace’ a whirl and experience this new phase of Chromebook sync abilities. Once in the latest version of the Canary Channel of ChromeOS, you can go to chrome://flags/#floating-workspace-v2 to turn on the flag, restart, and give it a whirl. Just remember, you need a second device in the Canary Channel to really test this out, so it might be worth the wait for it to all trickle down to the Developer Channel first.