ChromeOS Back To Safety

ChromeOS 131 Release Notes

Stable Channel
Released to stable on December 3, 2024

Safety, accessibility, and productivity: our newest release of ChromeOS includes quality-of-life features designed to protect your experience.

ChromeOS Back To Safety
Get back to a known good state by disabling extensions and resetting settings that could be hurting your experience. In past releases, you would need to powerwash ChromeOS to get your ChromeOS device to a known good state. Now, by selecting Safety reset, you can: reset Chrome settings and Chrome shortcuts, disable extensions, and delete cookies and other temporary site data. Bookmarks, history, and saved passwords won't be affected.

Flash notifications
If you frequently miss notifications that appear in the corner of the screen, you can now enable a setting that will flash the screen whenever a new notification arrives. This feature is particularly beneficial for customers who are hard of hearing or who use screen magnification and are often zoomed in, making it difficult to see corner notifications. This new setting can be found under Settings > Accessibility > Audio and captions > Flash notifications.

Quick Answers styling refresh
Get answers from your documents faster. Quick Answers is a GenAI-powered reading assistant for ChromeOS, giving users quick insights into web pages and PDF documents. This includes summaries, interactive outlines, and document Q&A. In ChromeOS 131, we introduce an updated styling for Quick Answers.

Also released in ChromeOS 131
ChromeOS 131 has a few updates to ChromeOS Flex management—and an update reminder for deployments using SCEP certificates and NPS for Radius for network authentication.

Split DNS for ChromeOS
You can now configure Secure DNS to be used on specified domains only. Admins can configure a list of domains to be included or excluded from using Secure DNS. You can configure this feature using these policies: DnsOverHttpsIncludedDomains⁠ and DnsOverHttpsExcludedDomains⁠.

ChromeOS Flex auto-enrollment
In ChromeOS 131, ChromeOS Flex auto-enrollment now allows you to deploy ChromeOS Flex devices at scale. Similar to ChromeOS zero-touch enrollment, automatic enrollment embeds an enrollment token created by an organization's administrator into a ChromeOS Flex image. This will determine which customer organization and organizational unit a device will enroll into during initial device setup. For more information, see Enroll ChromeOS devices⁠ and the ChromeOS Flex⁠ help center.

ChromeOS Flex forced re-enrollment
In ChromeOS 131, enrolled ChromeOS Flex devices support manual forced re-enrollment. If the policy is set to enforce either automatic or manual re-enrollment, ChromeOS Flex devices will prompt users to manually re-enroll after a factory reset. For more information, see Force wiped ChromeOS devices to re-enroll⁠ and the Forced re-enrollment⁠ device setting.

Microsoft SCEP SID update reminder
Note: Only for SCEP deployments using Microsoft NPS for RADIUS. If you are not using SCEP certificates in combination with Microsoft NPS for Radius for Chromebook network connectivity, you may disregard the remainder of these instructions.

Microsoft has announced a security update that will add a new required field, a Security Identifier (SID), to SCEP certificates in environments utilizing NPS for Radius for network authentication. Addition of the SID means that the certificate becomes linked to a device or user in your Active Directory environment so that an unknown device/user cannot use it. Follow the directions on Google Support’s Microsoft SCEP SID update reminder⁠.

Keep up-to-date with ChromeOS
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.