Once you’ve upgraded to Chrome OS 91, there are some hidden features you can turn on, including a new trash folder and a more convenient user interface for progressive web apps. There’s also a way to manually enable Chrome OS’s live subtitles for users who don’t already have them.
These features are intentionally hidden – they are still in the experimental phase and not ready for full release. Future Chrome OS updates will likely add them as standard features, but if you want to try them out early, you can. You’ll have to do whatever it takes to activate each feature and they may not work properly, but we’ll show you how to do it.
How to enable Chrome OS Trash folder
Let’s start with the hidden feature most Chromebook users want: a dedicated recycle bin that acts like the container for deleted files on Windows and Mac. As many Chromebook users painfully know, Chrome OS cannot restore files that were removed. However, you can change this by enabling the recycle bin.
When Chrome OS Recycle Bin is enabled, deleted files will be sent to the folder where they will remain until you restore them or delete them forever. The recycle bin can be accessed from the file manager window.
The Chrome OS trash folder is enabled from Chrome’s experimental flags menu:
- In a new Chrome tab, go to: chrome: // flags / # files-trash
- Put the flag on “Enabled.”
- Restart Chrome, and then restart your Chromebook.
How to enable progressive tabbed web app windows in Chrome OS 91
Progressive Web Apps (PWA) are web-based apps that look and run like locally installed software, but take up less space on your hard drive. Most PWAs run in a single window, but open links externally in a browser tab, making some PWAs less effective than loading the page in a browser (facing you, YouTube).
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Thankfully, Google will soon be implementing tabbed PWA navigation in Chrome OS so you can open multiple links or documents in a single PWA window and easily switch between them.
- Open a new Chrome tab and go to: chrome: // flags / # enable-desktop-pwas-tab-strip
- Choose “Activated” from the drop down menu.
- Further to: chrome: // flags / # enable-desktop-pwas-tab-strip-link-capturing
- Put this flag on “Activated” also.
- Restart Chrome when prompted to save changes.
- Restart your Chromebook.
The next time you install a PWA, a dialog box will ask if you want to run the tabbed PWA.
To open already installed PWAs with a tabbed window, right-click the app’s icon on the desktop and select New Window> New Tabbed Window.
How to enable live subtitles in Chrome OS 91
Finally, for some users, there is an option to enable live subtitles. For those who didn’t know, Live Caption on the Chromebook is the same AI-powered live transcription feature that turns any audio into screen captions on Android devices. The function also works when the volume is switched off or when you are offline. Live subtitles should be made available to everyone with the release of Chrome OS 91, but some devices don’t have it yet.
But don’t worry – you may be able to toggle it yourself.
- In a Chrome browser window, open: chrome: // flags / # enable-accessibility-live-caption
- Put the flag on “Enabled.”
- Restart Chrome for the changes to take effect.
- Restart your Chromebook.
- Check out our guide to live subtitles Learn how to enable (and disable) the feature on your Chromebook after it reboots.
There is a chance that Live Subtitles will not work even after enabling the flag as some users see an error that their device cannot download the required language files. There is a workaround for this, but it should only be temporary as it affects transcription accuracy.
- Go to Chrome again chrome: // flags / # enable-accessibility-live-caption-soda.
- Choose “Deactivated” from the box.
- Restart Chrome, and then restart your Chromebook.
After restarting, Live Captions should now work – but make sure to turn it back on # enable-accessibility-live-caption-soda Flag in the future to make sure you have downloaded the latest speech recognition files.
[Android Police]
