ChromeOS 125 Release Notes

In Chrome 125, a new Generative AI (GenAI) feature becomes available for unmanaged users: Generating insights for Chrome DevTools Console warnings and errors⁠. These insights provide a personalized description and suggested fixes for the selected errors and warnings.

ChromeOS 125 introduces the ability to install your PWA from anywhere with our Add to Chromebook badge and a ChromeOS App URL. This also introduces our new classic desktop-like install wizard for PWAs. It’ll display your PWA’s name, description, icons, and screenshots if you’ve got your Web App Manifest set up for the richer install UI⁠.

ChromeOS 125 expands support for live captions from 1 to 6 languages and dictation from 1 to 18 locales. We now use a new voice recognition model that provides additional battery savings.

• Live captioning. Live captions on ChromeOS can be used on videos played with the Gallery player app, in YouTube, in Google Meet, in Zoom, or social media sites. To see or change your current live captions language, select Settings > Audio and captions > Live Caption > Manage languages. For more information on live captions, see this Help Center⁠ article.

Dictation. Dictation is available on Google Docs, or in any other text input by enabling dictation in the taskbar, clicking the Mic button, and speaking. To see or change your dictation language, select Settings > Accessibility > Keyboard and text input > Dictation > Language. For more information on dictation, see this Help Center⁠ article.

ChromeOS now supports call control buttons on compatible Bluetooth headsets, including answering, rejecting or terminating a call, and muting the microphone.

A reduced animation setting is now available on ChromeOS under Accessibility > Display and Magnification > Reduced Animations. If you experience motion sickness, distractions or other types of discomfort when viewing animations, you can benefit from enabling this setting.

The Extensions Safety Check notifies users about extensions that might contain malware, policy violations, and extensions that have been unpublished long ago. It provides an interface for users to review these extensions and decide to keep or remove each flagged extension.

To expand the usefulness and the scope of this feature, Chrome 125 adds new triggers so that other potentially risky extensions can also be reviewed by users. There are two new extension types that we now flag for the user to review. 

• Extensions that are not installed from the Chrome Web Store
• Extensions that violate store policy by using deceptive installation tactics and are considered unwanted software

Extensions that are force-installed, installed by policy, version-pinned or blocked by policy are ignored and not flagged by these trigger criteria.

In ChromeOS 125 and later, Chromeboxes and Chromebases display a notification to prevent unintended Bluetooth device disconnections. This notification appears when you attempt to disable Bluetooth while only Human Interface Devices (HIDs) like keyboards or mice connected via Bluetooth are active.

ChromeOS Gallery video player now has a playback speed menu to control the playback speed.

To better support Enterprise customers who use SAML authentication and VPN in always-on strict mode (where no user traffic can get to the internet except via the VPN), we've added a new policy AlwaysOnVpnPreConnectUrlAllowlist⁠.

You can now view and manage Wi-Fi Passpoint in ChromeOS Settings. Under the Passpoint detailed page, view and remove an installed Passpoint subscription.

A network identifier was added to the secure DNS URI templates with identifiers policy. Admins can now configure a new placeholder in the DNS URI templates, which is replaced with the device local IP addresses when the users are connected to managed networks.

The Client Safe Browsing Report is a telemetry report sent to Safe Browsing when a warning is shown in Chrome. Today, download reports are sent when users discard or bypass a download warning. Based on the learnings from the initial tailored warning experiment, many download warnings are not explicitly discarded or bypassed. Reports are not sent for these warnings, so Safe Browsing doesn't have visibility on the effectiveness of these warnings. This feature aims to close this telemetry gap by sending reports when the download is auto-discarded or the browser is closed.

In Chrome 114, we introduced NewBaseUrlInheritanceBehaviorAllowed⁠ to prevent users or Google Chrome variations from enabling NewBaseUrlInheritanceBehavior, in case compatibility issues were discovered. Chrome 125 removes the temporary NewBaseUrlInheritanceBehaviorAllowed policy.

ChromeOS 125 allows easier captive portal sign-in with a dedicated window. The window opens as a tabless popup window. The URL is shown but it is not editable.

There are several new policies available in Admin console:

• DevToolsGenAiSettings⁠. These features in Google Chrome's DevTools employ generative AI models to provide additional debugging information. To use these features, Google Chrome has to collect data such as error messages, stack traces, code snippets, and network requests and send them to a server owned by Google, which runs a generative AI model. Response body or authentication and cookie headers in network requests are not included in the data sent to the server.
• ContextualGoogleIntegrationsEnabled⁠. Improve productivity by allowing information from Google apps and services to appear on Google ChromeOS system surfaces. If this policy is Enabled or left unset, the integrations selected in ContextualGoogleIntegrationsConfiguration are enabled. If this policy is Disabled, all integrations are disabled.
• ContextualGoogleIntegrationsConfiguration⁠. Select which services are included when ContextualGoogleIntegrationsEnabled is Enabled. When ContextualGoogleIntegrationsEnabled is Disabled, all services will be disabled, regardless of the settings of this policy. When ContextualGoogleIntegrationsEnabled is Enabled or not set, services can be selected by this policy.
• DeviceExtensionsSystemLogEnabled⁠. Enterprise extensions can add logs via the chrome.systemLog API to a system log file. Setting the policy to Enabled will allow the logs to be persisted in the system log file for a limited amount of time. Setting the policy to Disabled or leaving it unset does not allow the logs to be added to the system log file which means that logs will not be persisted between sessions.
• DeviceDlcPredownloadList⁠. This policy lets an administrator set a list of DLCs (Downloadable Content) to be downloaded as soon as possible. Downloaded DLCs are available to all users on the device.

For more Chrome browser and ChromeOS updates, check out Chrome Enterprise and Education release notes⁠⁠⁠. To keep up-to-date with the latest ChromeOS.dev news, sign up for the ChromeOS developer newsletter⁠ or join the ChromeOS Discord⁠.