Recently, I decided to revisit the world of dual monitor setups with my Chromebook after taking a break from the whole desktop setup fever thing I experienced a few years back. Everything seemed to be going smoothly (for the most part, more on that later) until I encountered an unexpected snag when trying to import media into Clipchamp. It quickly became apparent that I couldn’t drag the file picker over to the left, extended display. It was as if an invisible wall prevented me from performing this seemingly basic drag-and-drop operation. I then tried with several other applications like Gmail file attachments, and so on.
At first, I thought I might have configured my display settings wrong. Perhaps the monitors were in the wrong order? To my surprise, that wasn’t the case. My dual monitor setup fine, so why was this not working? As it turns out, web apps on Chromebooks have their file pickers inexplicably tied to them in some kind of container – that’s my guess, at least.
While some might consider this issue a minor nitpick, it is worth mentioning that many power users have been accustomed to this simple workflow habit for years on Windows, and it has proven to be a productive workflow. By allowing file pickers to be moved freely between monitors, it allows me to keep the application in view while I choose an appropriate piece of media to import. Maybe it’s psychology, I don’t know, but I like it.
ChromeOS has most certainly come a long way over the years, even in its desktop reliability, but it’s important to address these small yet significant usability issues to make it a viable replacement for a Windows.
As I continue to tinker with my Chromebook setup, I’ll continue to write down things that annoy me. Trust me, you’ll definitely be hearing about everything. For now, this is the issue I woke up with and chose violence with . I’d love to hear from you though. Have you experience this, or am I alone in taking notice of it? Do you use your Chromebook with an external monitor, mouse and keyboard? Have you run into anything weird that’s worth discussing? Sound off in the comments below!
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