Google Releases ChromeOS 117 With a New Material You Design

Google released ChromeOS 117 today, and it’s a major update with a new Material You design, improved multitasking features, shelf-based video conferencing features, and much more.

Generally speaking, Google delivers a new ChromeOS update every month, and while these updates are full OS updates—what Microsoft delivers for Windows once per year via Feature Updates—they are not at all disruptive or time-consuming to install: The Chromebook will reboot and return to the desktop quickly so you can get back to work. And Google will also occasionally deliver interim security fixes and software updates that are even less disruptive.

But this month’s update is bigger than usual and while this isn’t a formal cadence, if you look at Google’s What’s New with Chromebook? site, you can see bigger sets of updates generally arrive once per quarter. And this is most definitely one of those.

The biggest and most obvious change is the new Material You design, which came to Android 12 in 2021 (and was improved greatly in Android 13). With this new design, your wallpaper is augmented by a set of automatic and customizable accent colors that will now show up across the system, in places like Quick settings, the shelf (the ChromeOS Taskbar), window title bars, and more. It can be quite striking or even muted, depending on your wallpaper and accent color set choices. (And yes, you can turn it off.)

(Oddly, this theming does not extend to Android apps yet, but that’s because those apps are still running on Android 11. This should change when that subsystem is updated to Android 13. When will that be? “Soon.”)

ChromeOS 117 also introduces a Snap-like multitasking UI that appears when you mouse-over the Maximize button in the upper right of any window: The resulting pop-up lets you choose between Split, Partial, Full, and Float window layout options. You can also display these choices by typing LAUNCHER + Z. (The ChromeOS Launcher button, sometimes called the Search or Everything button, is similar to the Windows key on PCs.)

ChromeOS already offers system-wide webcam and microphone toggles on the shelf, but this new release adds a “Join” button to the shelf-based calendar pop-up that appears right before any meeting that is scheduled in Google Calendar and has a meeting link. This lets you join the meeting, no matter which service, without having to first open the Calendar app.

ChromeOS 117 also adds adaptive charging on supported Chromebooks, as we see in Android and Apple’s mobile platforms, an improved Clipboard that now displays more information when you view the clipboard by typing LAUNCHER + V, additional GIFs in the emoji picker, and several other additional new features.