Support our independent tech coverage. Chrome Unboxed is written by real people, for real people—not search algorithms. Join Chrome Unboxed Plus for just $2 a month to get an ad-free experience, access to our private Discord, and more. Learn more about membership here.
START FREE TRIAL (MONTHLY)START FREE TRIAL (ANNUAL)
We’ve reported on fingerprint scanners and their imminent arrival quite a few times around here. We know scanners are in place and we know a specific device that will likely be the flagship holder of the first-ever fingerprint scanner on a Chromebook.
So What’s New Today?
Thanks to an email tipper, we’ve learned that the Fingerprint Scanner settings and setup menus are now live in the Stable Channel of Chrome OS. Check out the screen grab below.
Want To See It For Yourself?
It is pretty simple to see this in action.
- Just type chrome://flags into the omnibar and hit enter.
- Next, hit CTRL + F to ‘find in page’ and type ‘fingerprint’ in the search bar that appears.
- Click through the results until you see ‘Quick Unlock (fingerprint)’ and click the dropdown to select ‘enable’.
- A blue button will appear down at the bottom, prompting a restart of Chrome. Do that and head to your general settings.
- In settings, head to the ‘Screen Lock’ section. You’ll need to re-enter your password to get in, but once you do, you’ll see all the fingerprint menus and settings.
Since there aren’t any Chromebooks with the needed hardware to make use of this, there’s no real way to test this out yet. You can only see how the setup will be handled for future hardware devices. However, it is encouraging to see these options moving to the Stable Channel already.
We have a sneaking suspicion that ‘Eve’ (the bearer of the aforementioned fingerprint scanner) may be joining us at the same time as the next generation Google Pixel, so it makes sense that some of these settings needed for ‘Eve’ will start making their ways through the various release channels.
As I said above, we’ve seen some of this before in the Canary channel of Chrome OS, so this isn’t necessarily a new thing.
It is simply closer to becoming reality and a harbinger of the arrival of what has become the most anticipated Chromebook ever: ‘Eve’.
