What's New
Chrome 55 brings a few new features, but is a relatively minor update. There are additional patches for the Samsung trackpad issue some of us have been facing, as well as a patch for a charging glitch that thankfully hasn’t affected us. But, now is a good time to be proactive and make sure your school’s Chromebooks are updated to v55.
The biggest news is in the form of performance enhancements behind the scenes. 55 brings with it major updates to the V8 Javascript Engine. This new version reduces Chrome’s overall memory consumption by up to 35% on low-memory devices. The added benefit here is that better RAM management means less power consumption. Less power consumption should translate to better battery life. This is great for our district's Chromebooks.
Chrome OS 55 was supposed to be the version that would disable Flash by default. However, that has not actually happened, so this will not affect any of our EdTech resources, such as ST Math. That is going to happen eventually, so remind your vendors that still utilize Flash, that it is time to upgrade their websites.
One last exciting back end update is SAML support for Integrated Windows Authentication. There is a big change coming to our Chromebooks that will make life much easier. More on that later.
In terms of end-user enhancements, the native photo editor now allows you to resize images. Maybe not the most earth shattering development, but a built-in photo editor that allows for cropping, resizing, and minor adjustment is just one more tool that helps make Chromebooks a fully developed and powerful OS. You aren’t going to be throwing away Photoshop, yet. But, you can make non-destructive adjustments, which is nice. Because it is a Google tool, edits are saved automatically. If you want to keep a copy of the original, just uncheck “Overwrite original.”
The biggest news is in the form of performance enhancements behind the scenes. 55 brings with it major updates to the V8 Javascript Engine. This new version reduces Chrome’s overall memory consumption by up to 35% on low-memory devices. The added benefit here is that better RAM management means less power consumption. Less power consumption should translate to better battery life. This is great for our district's Chromebooks.
Chrome OS 55 was supposed to be the version that would disable Flash by default. However, that has not actually happened, so this will not affect any of our EdTech resources, such as ST Math. That is going to happen eventually, so remind your vendors that still utilize Flash, that it is time to upgrade their websites.
One last exciting back end update is SAML support for Integrated Windows Authentication. There is a big change coming to our Chromebooks that will make life much easier. More on that later.
In terms of end-user enhancements, the native photo editor now allows you to resize images. Maybe not the most earth shattering development, but a built-in photo editor that allows for cropping, resizing, and minor adjustment is just one more tool that helps make Chromebooks a fully developed and powerful OS. You aren’t going to be throwing away Photoshop, yet. But, you can make non-destructive adjustments, which is nice. Because it is a Google tool, edits are saved automatically. If you want to keep a copy of the original, just uncheck “Overwrite original.”
More information available on the official Chrome Release Blog.
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