After rising requests over the past few years to add the date on a Chromebook's status bar, Chrome OS is finally updating to add the feature, along with showing important notifications. Honestly, we're surprised it wasn't there in the first place.
As seen on the Chromebook Help Community page, the issue had been raised back in 2018, with the only way to see the date being to hover your mouse over the clock on the status bar.
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A flag is set to be available soon through chrome://flags or Chrome OS Canary for a 'scalable status area', which shows the date appearing in the corner of the status bar next to the battery indicator, as seen on 9to5Google. However, according to the flag, this will only work when "the screen is sufficiently large."
According to Google, this means that only displays with more than 1280 pixels wide will show the date on the status bar. It's one step at a time, we suppose, but the new feature is still in testing, so this could eventually be added to Chromebooks of all sizes.
That's not all, as ChromeOS will also add important notification icons to the status bar, which includes low-battery warnings or a Caps Lock indicator. As for when to expect the status bar update, ChromeOS 90 is set to arrive this April.
There's a lot that the best Chromebooks get right, but there are still infuriating little details that make first-time Chromebook users grumpy — which is exactly what happened to us.
