Over on Google+, "Chromium evangelist" François Beaufort announced that Chrome OS, starting with Canary builds, will default to a floating virtual keyboard. This means that typing onscreen will, theoretically, be easier going forward as Google's desktop OS continues to expand its scope.

No one enjoys typing on a large display in landscape with a full virtual keyboard. This floating option will scale to be more "thumb-friendly," which is very easy to get behind. It can be dragged anywhere on screen, according to François. The next step is to do what I do with Swiftkey on tablets: split the keyboard between the two sides of the screen to allow for faster, dual-thumb typing.

If this excites you and you can't wait, François says to jump on the Dev channel and enable the flag chrome://flags/#enable-floating-virtual-keyboard. From here, activate the keyboard, hit the overflow button, select "Floating mode" (versus "Docking"), and get typing. Hopefully this doesn't take too long to trickle down to beta and stable.