14 DAY TRIAL // Good news for PixelBook owners today as Chromium evangelist at Google François Beaufort informs the community via his Google+ page that split screen support is coming to the Chromebook Pixel.
In an attempt to improve the multitasking capabilities of Chromebooks, Google implemented split screen support in the latest Chrome OS Dev channel via a new flag called "Split view in Tablet mode," which can be enabled only on the Google Pixelbook.
"Split screen is coming to the Google PixelBook and you can try it today in Dev Channel by enabling the experimental "Split view in Tablet mode" flag at chrome://flags/#enable-tablet-splitview," said François Beaufort in the Google+ post.
Pixelbook or Chromebook Pixel is Google's high-end Chromebook laptop coming preinstalled with the Linux-based Chrome OS operating system and capable of running Android apps that can be installed from the Google Play Store.
Here's how split screen works on Chromebook Pixel
As explained by François Beaufort, once the "Split view in Tablet mode" flag is activated, users will have to tap the []|| icon on the bottom right corner of their display to view all active windows. Then, they can simply snap them in the highlighted areas.
Unfortunately, it would appear that not all Android apps support snapping, which means that they don't support the new split screen functionality. So if you plan on trying the new feature, prepare to be disappointed as many of your favorite apps won't work.
Anyway, this is fantastic news for Chromebook owners, as Google will (most probably) expand split screen support to more, if not all Chromebook models in the coming months when Chrome OS 64 will hit the stable channel.
In related news, François Beaufort announced a couple of days ago that Chrome OS is getting hardware-accelerated video decoding and encoding capabilities in the chrome://gpu page via a new "Video Acceleration Information" section, which can be tested in the Chrome Canary experimental channel.
