Promised ChromeOS 121 feature finally arrives, but in the Dev Channel

I know I’ve been on this horse a lot lately, but there’s a frustrating habit the ChromeOS team has gotten into lately of announcing new features for ChromeOS, shipping the update, and letting those features slide to later versions of the OS. I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it: you shouldn’t announce new features tied to a specific update unless those features are set to arrive along with the OS update itself.

Having “new features” that are hidden behind feature flags or that roll out 3 weeks after an update is simply no good. For most Chromebook users, they see an update and a list of features that are supposed to come along for the ride and when those features aren’t available, they assume something is wrong or their update isn’t completed.

With a 4-week update cycle, there’s just no need for this. In the event that a new feature (like the one we’ll discuss today) isn’t quite ready for prime time, the answer is simple: put it in the next update. These updates are so frequent now that a 4-week wait feels like nothing at all these days. And if a feature doesn’t make it into the latest update, no one knows it was supposed to be there in the first place, and no one is the wiser.

Another missing, promised feature

The one I’m talking about today is a feature we didn’t know was coming and that I’ve been excited to try since I read about it in the release notes provided by the Chromebook Help Forum. In their notes for the 121 release (which I love having over at chromeos.dev now, by the way), there was a line calling out a new feature to use a trackpad gesture to dismiss pop-up notifications.

While this feature sounds like a small thing, I can’t tell you the number of times I’d use this on a given day. From time to time, those pop-ups hang around far too long and I’d love to get them moving along ASAP. But when I’m on a Chromebook without a touchscreen, there’s no option for this, so I have to mouse over the notification, find the tiny “X” in the corner, and dismiss it. A 2-finger swipe on the trackpad would be so much faster for this function.

And that’s exactly what this feature was finally supposed to deliver to Chromebooks well over a month ago. I was so excited to see it included, but since the update to 121 and then 122, I’ve tried it on various Chromebooks with no success. I thought maybe the whole thing as canned, but it turns out it is pushed back to ChromeOS 124 for now. In the Dev Channel, I was testing something completely different the other day and out of the new habit I’ve formed trying to test this new feature out, I swiped to the right with 2 fingers on the trackpad while the cursor was over a notification pop-up.

And it swiped away just as you’d expect! This is a lovely addition to the simple and intuitive UI for Chromebooks, and I’m beyond frustrated that I didn’t even know it was coming until official release notes said it was here when it simply wasn’t close to release. I get it: sometimes new features take time to get right and I 100% stand behind Google taking the time to work things out. I just wish they’d keep a bit more tight-lipped about it until they actually plan on delivering it to users. It would be far less confusing if that was the case.