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Zoom begins to cut off its original Chrome OS app while replacement PWA is riddled with issues [U]

zoom chromebooks app

Video conferencing app Zoom exploded in popularity during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and remains quite popular to this day. To better serve its Chrome OS users, Zoom announced earlier this year that it would launch a new Progressive Web App(PWA) that has since launched in beta with some new features. In recent weeks, Zoom has discontinued the functionality of its original Chrome OS extension, leaving users only with the PWA, which is experiencing multiple issues.

This post has been updated after publication for clarify and to reflect information from Zoom.

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Hands-on: Zoom’s new PWA brings video backgrounds, reactions to Chromebooks and the web

Zoom became a household name in 2020 as a result of COVID-19 lockdowns. It was clear pretty quickly, though, that the company wasn’t fully prepared for the massive influx of customers as security flaws and missing features quickly became evident. This week, over a year into the pandemic that’s made video calls more important than ever, Zoom is debuting its new PWA that enhances its functionality on the web and, specifically, on Chromebooks.

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Zoom will get a more functional app for Chromebooks next week; PWA will be in Play Store

zoom chromebooks app

Video conferencing exploded in popularity during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, especially in the early days as many businesses and schools went remote for the safety of employees and students. Zoom was the biggest name in the game for quite a while and still is extremely popular, but if you’ve ever used it on a Chromebook, you’re probably aware that it’s not quite up to snuff. Next week, though, that’s apparently set to change.

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Zoom is down this morning, so here’s how to start a Google Meet call

During the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, video conferencing has become more popular and important than ever before. Zoom has become the go-to service for video calling with groups, but on the morning of August 24th the service was hit with a massive outage, going down for users across the globe. While we wait for things to be fixed, here’s how to start a Google Meet call.

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Google Meet call w/ thousands of Googlers watched an executive’s son praise Zoom

google meet zoom

In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, Zoom has skyrocketed to mainstream popularity with hundreds of millions of users added in the past couple of months. Google Meet, on the other hand, hasn’t seen anything near Zoom’s success. To twist the knife, a Google Meet call with thousands of the company’s employees was recently presented with an executive’s son praising the competing service.


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You can now install extensions like Zoom, Hangouts onto Chromebooks for kids [Updated]

Google Chrome Chromebook Extensions Zoom

With everyone — including students of all ages — working from home, video conferencing apps like Zoom have become essential parts of daily life. However, the Chromebooks that many students have handy were hindered by not being able to install the Chrome extension for either Zoom or Hangouts, but that has just changed.

Update 4/22: Even more extensions are coming soon to Chromebooks with Family Link.


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zoom android app

Zoom’s Android app bombarded w/ negative reviews during coronavirus pandemic

In the midst of the COVID-19 outbreak, video conferencing is seeing a surge in popularity, and understandably, some services are struggling to keep up as a result. Zoom is currently one of the most popular options around, and as a result of service issues and other factors, the app’s Play Store rating has been filled with negative reviews.


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Google brings smooth Safari-like zoom to Chrome Canary for Mac

9to5Google: Beyond Good and Evil 2015-02-11 10-58-47

The latest build of Chrome Canary for Mac packs a great new feature that’s likely familiar to those who use Safari on a daily basis. While current stable builds of Chrome have a jaggedy pinch-to-zoom functionality that only zooms in 10% increments, the latest build of Chrome Canary provides a smooth buttery zoom experience like Apple’s browser.

As of right now, it looks like the feature works a little bit less fluidly than Apple’s offering, but that’s to expected in the most experimental public release version of Chrome. Zooming works the same way that it does in Safari and current versions of Chrome, so all it takes is pinching two fingers on the Trackpad.

If you’re sticking with Safari on your Mac for this reason or others (battery life, anyone?), it looks like this feature—once it makes its way to the stable release—will give you one more reason to switch over to Google’s browser. If you want to give it a try, head over and download the latest build of Chrome Canary.