ChromeOS 129 Release Notes

Translate captionable content from Live Captions into a language of your choice on Chromebook Plus devices⁠. With Live Translate, you can translate captions into another language as long as your conversation supports Live Captions. Live Translate will work with conference calls, videos, and YouTube.

Connect, configure, and find companion apps for your peripherals. Peripheral Welcome delivers a high-quality Welcome Experience by letting you know that your peripheral is successfully connected and inviting you to configure and make the most out of it.

Turn on Select-to-Speak with the Select-to-Speak keyboard shortcut (Search + s). You no longer need to enable it in Settings first. A dialog displays confirming that you want to turn on select to speak the first time you press the keyboard shortcut.

Easily adjust keyboard brightness and control the ambient light sensor directly from the Settings app on your Chromebook. This new feature lets you set your keyboard brightness to the perfect level and turn the ambient light sensor on or off as needed.

Easily adjust your Chromebook’s display brightness and control the ambient light sensor directly from the Settings app. This new feature lets you set your screen brightness to the perfect level and turn the ambient light sensor on or off as needed in the Settings app.

You can now pin and unpin icons to your toolbar via a new side panel, for fast access. This feature will roll out gradually, starting with Chrome 129.

Save your passkeys to Google Password Manager and use them across devices and platforms. Until ChromeOS 129, passkeys have been slightly more difficult to use across all devices—making it harder to use passkeys to improve user security.

An update to the battery icon ensures that the battery state no longer covers the battery level. Now you can easily see how much battery you have left.

This launch enables PIN as an authentication factor in all authentication surfaces across ChromeOS.

In ChromeOS 129, we have added a new wallpaper collection to celebrate and share our gratitude and support to educators around the world.

Organizations can extend Chrome Enterprise Premium⁠’s powerful scanning and content and context-based protection to local files on ChromeOS on Managed Guest Sessions. For example, a misplaced file containing Social Security numbers is instantly blocked when a user attempts to copy it to an external drive, safeguarding this confidential information.

Screenshot protections allow Admins to prevent users from taking screenshots or screen sharing specific web pages considered to contain sensitive data. This feature is available to Chrome Enterprise Premium⁠ users only. This feature can be controlled via the same EnterpriseRealTimeUrlCheckMode⁠ Chrome Enterprise policy that enables all real-time URL lookups.

Starting from ChromeOS version 129, we enhance the data security for Android on ChromeOS. Enterprise accounts that are added as secondary accounts in-session will no longer automatically be added to the Android on ChromeOS environment. This change does not affect consumer accounts, education accounts, or accounts that were previously added.

Starting from version 129, ChromeOS optimizes the support of 3P identity provider based logins. In the most common scenario, administrators show a permanent 3P identity provider login on the sign in screen. Many identity providers time out after a specific cadence, for example, 15 mins, leading to errors for the user. The new DeviceAuthenticationFlowAutoReloadInterval⁠ policy allows for a repeated refresh of 3P identity providers on the login screen, avoids timeouts, and therefore significantly increases the reliability of 3P identity provider logins.

Client side encryption (CSE) is a Google Workspace and Drive feature that allows customers and users to encrypt files with customer provided keys so that data is encrypted and never stored on our servers in the clear. This launch provides basic CSE support in the Files app on ChromeOS. This includes making CSE files visible, opening CSE files in the browser and flagging non Google Workspace CSE files as unsupported.

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.