ChromeOS 140 is one of the quietest updates ever, and might be a sign of things to come

It’s been about two weeks since ChromeOS 140 began rolling out to the stable channel, and if you’ve been waiting for a post from us detailing all the new features, you’re not alone. With every new milestone update, we get excited to dig in, flip some flags, and find all the latest goodies. But with ChromeOS 140, we’ve come up almost completely empty.

And as it turns out, we’re not the only ones. Two weeks after its arrival, new features in ChromeOS 140 remain a bit of a mystery. We haven’t been able to discern any significant user-facing changes, and more tellingly, Google has yet to publish any official release notes for the update.

The silence is deafening

Typically, within a day or two of a new version of ChromeOS arriving, we get the official release notes detailing the new additions. The complete absence of these notes for M140 is highly unusual and the clearest sign yet that there’s likely not anything really worth mentioning for most users in this update. Sure, there are always under-the-hood security patches and bug fixes, but the lack of any new features is most definitely notable and, frankly, a bit of a bummer.

Is this the calm before the storm?

This quiet update does have me wondering if it is indicative of what we can expect for the next little bit? With the massive, foundational work being done to merge Android and ChromeOS, it feels plausible that we could be entering a temporary lull in major, splashy feature drops for the current version of the OS.

As the development teams focus their energy on those huge, behind-the-scenes architectural changes, it’s possible that the next few milestone updates might be similarly quiet. While I’m not entirely sure that’s the case, the radio silence around ChromeOS 140 certainly makes it feel that way.

For now, the takeaway is simple: don’t expect any big, flashy new tricks from the ChromeOS 140 update. It appears to be a maintenance release, through and through. While the present might be a bit quiet on the feature front, we’re still incredibly excited about the big changes on the horizon for ChromeOS.