Quick Insert for Chromebooks is failing hard with the new GIF insertions

When ChromeOS 134 was announced, a key update was added that had me quite excited to use Quick Insert for once, and I couldn’t wait for it to show up. With the roll-out of M134 this week, I was primed and ready to start inserting GIFs into all manner of conversations with my Chromebook’s handy new tool. But the reality has been far from what I initially imagined.

First, I will say that the Quick Insert feature in ChromeOS is still a very under-utilized addition to ChromeOS – at least for me and a vast majority of those that participated in our poll last week. It needs a few killer applications, and I just haven’t found those use cases yet. But I really thought GIF insertion was going to be the thing that had me pulling up Quick Insert far more often.

As it turns out, for now I still won’t be using it; and the problem comes down to consistency. While the implementation of GIF insertion is quite good with Quick Insert (pull up Quick Insert with Launcher + F, click the GIF button up top, search for what you want, and click on it), the location you choose to insert your GIF into is problematic for the time being.

While it works as expected in Discord, it only inserts a still image in WhatsApp for Web; and even worse won’t even attempt to insert anything for the Android version of WhatsApp or even the first-party Google Messages PWA. There are no errors or pop-ups; it just doesn’t do anything.

Gmail on the web worked as expected, but the Gmail Android app once again failed completely. So now you have a mix of web-based apps that are hit-or-miss and what seems like a general incompatibility with Android apps when it comes to the GIF inserter. And as I tested further, it seems many parts of the Quick Insert feature actually don’t work at all with Android apps. Sigh.

This is both frustrating and disappointing, but I don’t see the Android parts of this mess getting sorted until the Android Kernel is put in place. Once Android is a deep-seated part of ChromeOS, Android apps should function far better than they do right now with cross-platform features.

As for the web app side of things, this simply needs to be fixed. If Quick Insert is generally meant for web apps, that’s fine: but it needs to work well across the board. If it worked everywhere except WhatsApp, I’d lay blame there. But when it doesn’t work properly with Google’s own Messages app, it becomes clear that there’s work to be done here. It’s a shame, too; I was really ready to start embracing Quick Insert quite a bit more. Maybe one day.