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In running a few tests the other day, I ended up putting one of our office-dwelling Chromebooks in the Canary Channel of ChromeOS 124. Full disclosure, I was seeing if I could get the new ChromeOS App Mall to appear. I could not, unfortunately, even with all the clear and obvious flags turned on. In the Chromium Repositories, most of the work done on that new feature is already merged, so I thought it was a good time to try.
Though my attempts did not yield the fruit I was after, a curious thing happened in the process: the new, detached Lacros Chrome browser was simply on and available out of the box. I had no flags other than the App Mall selected, and after noticing that I was running Lacros with no setup, I even turned off that flag to make absolutely sure that what I was seeing was legit.
Lacros is here in ChromeOS 124
And it was! Right now, in ChromeOS 124 (124.0.6351.0 more specifically), when you boot up your Chromebook for the first time, with no warning or setup, Lacros is your primary browser. The easiest way to see this is by looking up to the right of the URL bar and checking for the account switcher. All versions of Chrome (Windows, MacOS, Linux) have this except the Chromebook version, but Lacros brings this sort of browser-level account switching to Chromebooks as well.
And it seems we may finally be just around the corner from it finally arriving. Along with account switching, Lacros will provide Chromebooks with enhanced security moving forward as the Chrome version for ChromeOS will stay in lock-step with all other versions of Chrome. With the new weekly update cycle Chrome enjoys for new features, bug fixes, and security patches, Lacros will allow the Chrome browser on Chromebooks to get those same feature/security updates swiftly without the need of an OS update to accompany them.
As excited as we are to see Lacros finally arrive, I still hold the opinion that I’m really glad Google took their time on this. Unbinding Chrome from ChromeOS was certainly a mammoth undertaking, and it simply has to be done right. That takes time, and for a company that is more prone to release new features in more of a Beta test fashion, I’m glad Google seems to have taken steps to ensure the decoupling of Chrome from ChromeOS goes well. I suppose we’ll know for sure soon enough ChromeOS 124 is slated to arrive on April 30th, 2024.
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