Advertisements

Chrome OS upgrades are easy and very frequent. As a user, the only thing that you need to do is occasionally restart your Chromebook to finish the upgrade. Google wants to improve this piece of the upgrade process as well by giving color codes to the upgrade notification.

Chrome OS downloads updates in the background. After the update is installed, a notification informs users that they need to restart their device to complete the installation. This notification has always been a white up arrow on the system tray. This seems to be changing.

Advertisements

I regularly shut down my computers after use. I like fresh sessions each time I pick up any of my devices. (Oh no, I don’t do this with my phone btw). However, not everyone is like me. There are many who restart or shut down their computers once in a week or so. Google wants to let those users know when a restart is due.

Recently, the “restart required” started showing up in yellow for me on the Canary channel of Chrome OS. This week, I started seeing my friends discuss these new icon colors. A couple of them found these changes documented in Chromium OS code.

Image via Google

One such bug report says:

– Implement ChromeOS upgrade detection via UpdateLibrary observer and

apply a slightly different advisory timing for showing the badges

(show green arrow immediately on upgrade detected, then 2, 4, 7 days

for yellow, red and orange color);

The default Restart to update notification will now be green. When users delay the restart, this icon will change color to yellow after two days, red after four days and orange when it is more than seven days overdue.

So, the next time when an upgrade is waiting for a restart to complete, you will change this color change in the system tray. Do not panic!

Thanks, Denny and Dymphe.