New Features with ChromeOS 126

Released to stable on July 25, 2024

Extract text directly from PDFs with optical character recognition (OCR), aided by AI. ChromeOS 126 brings improvements to screen readers, live captions, and digital zoom. Available on June 25, 2024.

Extract text from PDFs for screen reader users
Chrome browser now launches an optical character recognition (OCR) AI reader for PDFs, creating a built-in PDF screen reader for inaccessible documents, further filling the gap in accessibility for low vision and blind users across the web.

PDF is open in Chrome Browser. A menu shows the option to “Extract text from PDF.

This feature leverages Google's OCR models to extract, compartmentalize, and section PDF documents to make them more accessible. A local machine intelligence library is installed that uses Screen AI technology to analyze screenshots and the accessibility tree—extracting more information to help assistive technology, such as texts and the main content of the page.

Extended auto-update opt-in and policy
ChromeOS provides 10 years of OS updates for security, stability, and performance improvements. Most devices will receive these updates automatically. For a subset of older devices, users and administrators can now opt in to extended updates to get a full 10 years of support.

For details, see our Help Center article⁠.

Locale expansion for Live Captions and Dictation
ChromeOS 126 expands support for live captions from 1 to 6 languages and dictation from 1 to 18 locales. Further, Chrome now uses a new voice recognition model that provides additional battery savings.

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, read the Help Center⁠ article.

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.

Digital zoom with Super Resolution
The built-in Camera app now supports zooming on cameras that do not have optical zoom motors, including the built-in camera. On selected high-performance Chromebooks, AI-based Super Resolution may be applied to further enhance the images.

Magnifier to follow select-to-speak
When you read text aloud using Select to Speak, the screen magnifier can now automatically follow the words, so you never lose your place. Magnifier following select-to-speak is a feature designed for people who have low vision, but may be beneficial for anyone who enjoys reading text at larger sizes.

To try this out, first enable both Magnifier and Select to Speak in your settings. Under Docked Magnifier toggle Magnifier follows the word being read by select-to-speak.

Under "Docked magnifier," are two settings: "Docked zoom level" (set to 4x) and "Magnifier follows the word being read by select-to-speak" (toggled on).

Then, adjust zoom to your preferred level using ctrl + alt + brightness up and ctrl + alt + brightness down. Finally, select the text you want to read out and press the select-to-speak play button, or search + s, and Magnifier will follow words as they are spoken.

Also released in ChromeOS 126
Apart from exciting new accessibility features, ChromeOS 126 comes with some tweaks to improve user experience—such as changes to scrolling, cursors, and hotspots.

Turn off overscroll behavior
A new setting is available to turn on and off the swipe gesture to navigate between pages. This feature is also known as overscroll or overscrolling pages.

This setting is found under Settings > Accessibility > Cursor and touchpad > Use a swipe gesture to navigate between pages.

Turn off cursor blink rate
A new setting is available to turn off the blinking text cursor under Settings > Accessibility > Keyboard and text input > Text cursor blink rate. Customers with photosensitive seizure triggers and cognitive differences may want to turn off the blinking text cursor.

Set up a new Chromebook with Android phone
You can now set up a new Chromebook using your Android phone. By establishing a secure connection between your phone and the Chromebook, you can automatically transfer your Wi-Fi and Google Account login information without needing to manually enter your passwords. This is available for unmanaged users only.

Instant Hotspot
ChromeOS 126 renames the Instant Tethering feature to Instant Hotspot.

Enhanced firmware updates
ChromeOS 126 supports firmware updates on a variety of additional peripherals. This significantly reduces the overhead and time needed to make new firmware updates available.

Remote management for idle devices
Chrome Remote Desktop (CRD) is a feature that allows for remote control of ChromeOS devices, primarily for troubleshooting purposes, where a device is idle and unused. Admins can now initiate a CRD connection to a ChromeOS device sitting on the login screen. This enables an admin to sign-in to a managed device with their own set of credentials for troubleshooting or testing.

Supervised user extensions installation
For supervised accounts managed via Family Link, we are separating the parental control for Permissions for sites, extensions, and apps to give parents more granular control. Parents now have two options to choose from: Permissions for apps and Extensions. The impact on supervised accounts is that a parent can now allow extensions installations with or without approval. Previously, parents could block extensions but had no way to allow them without approval.

Interactive setup guides for Chrome Enterprise Core
The Chrome Enterprise team introduces new interactive setup guides for browser management in the Admin console, where administrators can choose a journey they’re interested in and get hands-on training in related Chrome setup guides.

Multi-calendar support
View events from multiple calendars at once. With ChromeOS 126, we launch multi-calendar support to let you view all events from multiple calendars that you select within the Google Calendar widget.

New policy to control Kiosk wake and sleep times
ChromeOS 126 introduces a new kiosk device policy that allows Admins to schedule when a device will wake and sleep. For more details, see Kiosk settings⁠.

Memory Saver aggressiveness
Memory Saver is a feature that deactivates unused tabs to free up memory on a user's device. There is an existing policy, HighEfficiencyModeEnabled⁠, which allows administrators to control the Memory Saver feature. A new policy called MemorySaverModeSavings⁠ allows you to configure how aggressive the Memory Saver is when deciding to deactivate tabs. Choose the conservative option to deactivate fewer tabs or the aggressive one to get the most memory savings.

Reactive prefetch on Desktop
This feature enables prefetching of subresources during a navigation, to speed up navigations and load new pages faster. The subresources prefetched are predicted by a Google-owned service. The browser shares the URL of pages being navigated to with this service, to retrieve predictions. You can control this feature using the UrlKeyedAnonymizedDataCollectionEnabled⁠ policy.