Chrome OS Set to Get Touch-Friendly Controls in Upcoming Redesign

Chrome OS on Chromebooks was initially not designed as a touch-friendly interface but after the introduction of support for Google Play apps, things were bound to change. It now seems like the operating system might soon receive a design overhaul that would focus primarily on support for touch-based controls.

A new video, shared by Google Chromium Happiness Evangelist Francois Beaufort, shows an app drawer just like Android with Google Search bar and some app icons that can be launched with a tap. Users can further get access to all their apps by swiping up on this app drawer. To enable, Beaufort notes users must enable the chrome://flags/#enable-fullscreen-app-list flag, restart Chrome, and press the Search key to see it in action.

With a simple tap, you can also perform voice search and the operating system will open the search result in a new Chrome window.

The touch-friendly interface is already live in Canary versions of Chrome OS, which is essentially an alpha build of the OS. As it is an early build, you can expect bugs and glitches that still need ironing out by the company. Google added a 'hybrid' mode to the OS last year to space out the icons little more and make it easier to tap them, as pointed out in a report by The Verge. However, this seems to be one of the giant leaps towards making the operating system more touch-friendly than before.

As Samsung and Acer have been building Chromebooks with touchscreens for quite some time now, it appears that with this latest introduction, users will be able to do more touch-based actions with their portables than before.