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Google Drive Integrated Into ChromeOS Dev Channel

One of Google’s worst kept secrets, Google Drive, finally launched this week to fanfare and fear over content rights. Regardless of your feelings towards Google Drive, it’s a step that Goo...
Google Drive Integrated Into ChromeOS Dev Channel
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  • One of Google’s worst kept secrets, Google Drive, finally launched this week to fanfare and fear over content rights. Regardless of your feelings towards Google Drive, it’s a step that Google needed to take as a company. Now you might have wondered when Google Drive was going to be integrated into ChromeOS. Well, wonder no more as it’s just been added.

    Google announced some updates to the Dev channel in Chrome OS today that adds the Google Drive support that many of you were probably clamoring for. To get the news out of the way first though, the Dev channel is now up to version 20 for Chromebooks. While the big addition is the Google Drive integration, they also fixed an issue “where audio was not heard on video playback when multiple tabs are open.”

    There are some issues that are still plaguing Chrome OS, but Google is aware of them. The good news is that a few of these issues have really simple workarounds. Here’s the full list:

    File manager menu item is missing from the wrench menu. Workaround: Use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-M or go to chrome://files to open the file manager.

    Power button is sometimes unresponsive. Workaround: Long press the power button to shutdown the system.

    Unable to enter CJK or other complex characters

    Unable to connect to GSM network

    Two-finger click sometimes fails on Mario

    Occasionally machine fails to detect ethernet connection. Workaround: Rebooting the machine often clears the problem

    Cannot add hidden WEP/WPA networks

    Audio is not heard when playing certain media file types when files are saved to the Chromebook

    Now you may be wondering how Google Drive looks in the Dev Channel. Thankfully our friends at Techcrunch tested out Drive for Chrome OS and found it to be pretty basic. Frederic Lardinois said that at the moment Google Drive is just another folder in the file manager. He also says that you can’t download files from your Google Drive account onto your internal storage despite there now being an “available offline” column.

    In essence, this update just lays the groundwork for future Google Drive support on Chrome OS. It’s still worth checking out. Google may even roll out a small update just for Google Drive to make it more robust on the Chrome platform.

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