Google has been making the most out of the Labs section in Chrome lately. Yesterday, three new experiments and today we get another and it's a big one, cloud printing. The feature has been announced for quite a while now, but it looks like Google is getting very close to making it available to everyone.
Cloud Print is now one of the features in Labs in the most recent Chromium builds. The feature is clearly at home in Chrome OS, but could prove useful for anyone running Chrome on any operating system.
As the name implies,
Cloud Print enables you to print anything from anywhere by using the web. The feature enables Chrome users to hit the print button and use any devices they have connected to print the content.
The devices can be web-enabled printers, some of which are already available, but also any kind of printer through the use of a "proxy PC," a computer running a special software which connects to the Google cloud.
The feature has been enabled in Chromium, but just like
Remoting, it doesn't work for everyone. Presumably, it works for Google employees who are testing it.
For now, if you enable it, a new section is available in the options menu. You'll be able to sign in with your Google account, like with the sync feature, after which you'll be able to manage printers you have access to.
There is also a web dashboard to manage print jobs. For now, since you can't add any printer, there's not that much you can do. But this should change soon enough.
Google Chrome OS is slated for a fall launch and should be coming soon, if not this month than in the first half of November. Once it lands, features like cloud printing, background apps, Remoting and others will make a lot more sense. [
via DownloadSquad]
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