According to 9to5Google, Google is currently working on a new printing solution for Chrome OS – which has long been needed, as recently Google announced that Google Cloud Print will be shut down soon, so Google is working on a more traditional printing interface for Chrome OS.

Despite the fact Chromebooks are marketed towards the education market, they don’t currently provide a good solution to printing and scanning documents. Google announced that Cloud Print will be axed in 2020 and this was a service that allowed users to connect a printer to the cloud so that you could print from your devices when you’re not on the same network. It was very useful for Chrome OS devices, however was rather lacklustre for anything else.

Cloud Print had no real way for the user to see current and queued jobs, which would be frustrating if you wanted to cancel a job. It was also a struggle to manage the printers being used or know of errors when something was not printed correctly.

Work recently began on a “Print Management app,” this was discovered through a Chrome OS flag. The flag description reads: “Enables the print management app that allows Chrome OS users to view and manage their native print jobs.”

This is expected to be a web-based System Web app (SWA) that will be accessible from the settings app, it show the user a list of recent printing attempts, including its description, the time it started, whether it succeeded and the printer it was sent to.

Another new flag surfaced, it’s titled “An experimental UI that allows users to interact with a connected scanner.” This UI will be included in the Print Management app, so both printing and scanning tools are in one place.

It’s not clear when the feature will be available, but we should see it in the next following months.

Source: 9to5Google