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)
Back in November, we stumbled upon the fact that the pinch to zoom function was now working on a handful of devices which confirmed our previous findings that this much-needed feature was headed to Google’s Pixelbook, the Samsung Pro and Plus as well as the Chromebook Pixel 2015.
So, it was no surprise that we’ve now caught wind that this feature will now be rolling out to ALL Chrome OS devices and enabled by default.
XDA stumbled upon the commit this week and it appears the change may already be getting pushed out to Chromebooks everywhere before any major version milestone.
Enable touchpad pinch-to-zoom on all devices
Set the pinch_enable flag to true by default.
I took a closer look at the bug report attached to the commit and was surprised to see that this feature has actually been in the works since 2015. I’m not sure what exactly was roadblocking the pinch to zoom function but it’s great to see that it will finally be a native part of Chrome OS.
The update comes hot off the heels of Google adding support in Chrome for Windows smooth scrolling feature and will definitely create a more homogeneous ecosystem for Chrome across all platforms.
If you’re interested in checking to see if your device has the pinch to zoom function, just head to chrome://flags and search for “pinch.” You should find(if it’s available) a flag titled “pinch scale.” Make sure it is in the enabled position and restart your browser. You’re all set. You can now zoom in and out to your heart’s content.
Source: Chromium Repository via XDA
