Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Good news for people who like running bleeding-edge software on brand-new, expensive hardware: Google has added rudimentary support for the MacBook Pro Touch Bar to the latest release of Chrome's Canary channel, the earliest and least-stable way for consumers and developers to try out new Chrome features.

Based on what Apple is doing in the Touch Bar with Safari, Google could definitely push the envelope a little more. Chrome adds a handful of static buttons to the Touch Bar that duplicate the onscreen Back, Forward, Refresh, New Tab, and Favorite buttons, along with a larger button that moves the cursor to the address bar for easy typing and searching; as best as we can tell from digging in the settings, there's no way to customize the Touch Bar to hide or change individual buttons. Safari also adds some buttons to the Touch Bar, but it also changes dynamically to show you bookmarks and lets you switch between your open tabs with a series of tiny preview windows.

Third-party app support for the Touch Bar is far from universal, but updates are slowly trickling out. The Mac version of Microsoft Office added Touch Bar support last week, fulfilling a promise made at the October event where the MacBook Pros were announced. Adobe Photoshop added support in December.

Of Chrome's four release channels, Canary is the least stable and most subject to change, and changes in Canary are generally at least three months away from appearing in the stable Release channel. Those changes need to make it through the Dev and Beta channels first, and each release gestates in each channel for around six weeks. That means there's plenty of time for Google to tweak its Touch Bar implementation if it wants to. But in any case, even basic support is better than none.

Listing image by Google