14 DAY TRIAL // Google is working on a touch UI for Chrome, that much is certain. The UI code is in the Chromium repositories and you can build a version with touch interface support. Already, some elements are fairly advanced and adopted for a touch screen device.
Still, plenty of other things need work and it doesn't seem like touch UI is a priority project for Google Chrome.
The first Chromebooks have only started selling and Google has said nothing of an official touchscreen device coming time soon.
There are probably no plans for anything like this soon either, at least until the Chromebooks and Chrome OS pick up some Steam and especially until the Web Store becomes more popular and populated.
That said, developer François Beaufort compiled a recent version of Chrome with the touch UI enabled to see if there have been any major breakthroughs.
Unfortunately that's not the case, but he did make a video showcasing all of the UI elements. There's not much that we haven't seen already, but perhaps it's worth another look.
The first things you'll notice are also the ones that got the most work. The tabs have a great big favicon doubling as button/icon on top of them to make it easier to navigate through them.
The on-screen keyboard still looks nice and seems useful enough for regular use cases, meaning typing an URL or a query in the OmniBox.
Speaking of the Omnibox, it too is different, with suggestions split in vertical list rather than horizontal one, again to make it easier to pick among them on a touch-based device.
But this is as far as the optimization goes. There are oversized right-click menus, on the tabs and in the pages, as well as an oversized wrench menu, but there's no optimization or customization besides the huge fonts.
As you dig even deeper, there's even fewer work. That said, there's probably no rush to get this finished, in fact the UI elements and the code may not even end up in a shipping version of a touch-input Chrome OS device. [via ChromeStory]