This handy feature has been promised to ChromeOS users for a while now - but it’s still stuck in development

Indonesian junior high school students study online using chromebook laptops

(Image credit: Pramata via Shutterstock)

ChromeOS users have been promised a new trackpad gesture feature that’ll make dismissing pop-up notifications a breeze - but we’re yet to see it actually appear on any Chromebooks. Instead, some demo users have stumbled upon the feature in Google’s Developer Channel - a full month later.

The new controls were technically introduced to ChromeOS in February, due to be rolled out ‘over the coming days’ according to the official blog post. However, it seems the feature is still trapped in development limbo. Robby Payne from ChromeUnboxed laments how common it seems to be for new features to be announced for ChromeOS only for a few specific features to be completely left out until the next update.

It seems like that might be the case with the gesture feature. An entirely new ChromeOS 122 update was introduced at the start of March with no mention of the gesture control, implying either that the feature has already been rolled out or entirely forgotten about.

Doing it in parts

Payne notes that while he had no success trying to use the feature on different Chromebooks, it wasn’t until he was doing something else in the ChromeOS Development Channel and decided to try the gesture when a pop-up notification appeared - it worked!

While it may seem like just a small thing to be concerned about, the gesture control still being locked away in the Dev Channel is a good example of ChromeOS developers leaving users hanging after promising new features.

The new feature is intuitive and super useful in the day-to-day and the fact that it seems to be another example of ChromeOS users having to just hope and wait for parts of their updates to actually roll out continues to be frustrating.

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Muskaan is TechRadar’s UK-based Computing writer. She has always been a passionate writer and has had her creative work published in several literary journals and magazines. Her debut into the writing world was a poem published in The Times of Zambia, on the subject of sunflowers and the insignificance of human existence in comparison.

Growing up in Zambia, Muskaan was fascinated with technology, especially computers, and she's joined TechRadar to write about the latest GPUs, laptops and recently anything AI related. If you've got questions, moral concerns or just an interest in anything ChatGPT or general AI, you're in the right place.

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