Your Chromebook will soon let you make use of all of those extra buttons on your gaming mouse

A new discovery by our friend C2 Productions over on X and Twosapp reveals that Google is working on giving you the ability to fully customize how each button on your mouse interacts with your Chromebook.

Customize your mouse buttons

As shown in the image below, you can “Click additional buttons on your (mouse) to add or locate buttons. This means that if you have, let’s say, a Logitech gaming mouse plugged into your laptop, you’ll be able to detect the additional side buttons that come with it and likely tell them what functions to perform.

While this was first discovered a few months ago, we still don’t have many specifics about the mouse customization feature, but it does look promising. At this time, it appears under the “Device” section of the Chromebook Settings app alongside the mouse cursor “primary mouse button” swapping mechanic that’s great for left handed users, and the mouse scrolling speed.

I’m encouraged by these advancements

As someone who’s recently been diving into the deep end of Linux and Ubuntu 23.10 in an effort to extend some of the feeling of my Chromebook experience to the desktop (I can”t get chromeOS Flex on my custom rig), it’s encouraging to see Google adding some more advanced features to its relatively simply operating system.

For those who aren’t aware, ChromeOS is based on Gentoo Linux, so there’s plenty of extensibility here for the future of the OS and Google’s efforts, and it’s clear just by looking at certain aspects of it – especially the Files app and its limitations – that the company has lots of room to grow and evolve in this space.

Chromebooks are for gaming

With the introduction of ‘Borealis’ or Steam on Chromebooks, and along with it, many users looking to do some serious gaming on Google’s laptop operating system, it’s clear that there’s a need for some more specific customization to help us get more out of our hardware in these experiences.

Many games utilize these additional buttons, and out of the box, Chromebooks are fairly simple in their implementation of the mouse and keyboard. I’m excited to see Google add this update and even though we’re not sure when it will drop, it will be a welcome feature alongside the RGB keyboard detection we recently received with ChromeOS 116.