Chrome OS 88 Arrives

Google is rolling out Chrome OS 88 this week, adding a faster web sign-in experience and personalized lock screens to the platform.

“We’re always finding ways to make using Chromebooks as seamless as possible,” Google’s Alexander Kuscher writes. “Today, with our latest Chrome OS release, we’re introducing a faster sign-in experience as well as personalized lock screens.”

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Here’s what’s new.

Faster web sign-in experience. Thanks to a new Web Authentication (WebAuthn) feature, you can now securely sign-in to websites with the same PIN or fingerprint that you use to sign-in to Chrome OS. And if you use two-step verification to sign-in, the Chrome OS PIN or fingerprint ID can be used as the second factor too.

Personalized lock screen. Now, you can use the Chrome OS lock screen as if it were a Google Assistant-powered smart display, with a customized photo album, weather, music identification, and more. To configure this, open Chrome OS Settings and navigate to Personalization > Screen saver.

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Conversation 4 comments

  • the escalation

    26 January, 2021 - 2:28 pm

    <p>Isn't Chrome 88 also the release that neuters certain ad-blockers? </p>

    • dftf

      27 January, 2021 - 8:12 am

      <blockquote><em><a href="#610102">In reply to the escalation:</a></em></blockquote><p>I think the "Manifest v3" update has come in with Chrome 88, yes, but I think for now the older-method is still supported. So for now it's essentially a transition period…</p><p><br></p><p>I'm still unsure though whether this change will be reflected in the other Chromium browsers, such as Edge, Vivaldi, Brave or Opera, or whether they use their own page-modification methods</p>

  • hrlngrv

    Premium Member
    26 January, 2021 - 5:08 pm

    <p>Pure curmudgeon: gimme the option of telephone OR PC-like <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">numeric </span>keypad layout for PINs.</p>

  • dftf

    27 January, 2021 - 8:14 am

    <p>Along with the latest versions of Edge and Firefox this month, this version also removes support for Adobe Flash.</p><p><br></p><p>IE11 will continue to run it (providing you still have the ActiveX version manually-installed) and I think the current Firefox ESR release does also, for anyone who may need it (I don't!)</p>

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