Complete with offline capabilities
Slowly but surely, Google has been replacing legacy Chrome apps with Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). The benefits here are numerous, including the fact that software like this doesn’t have to be tied to any one specific platform. Now Chrome’s calculator app is the latest to find a new home on the web
Starting with the new Chrome OS 97 update (per 9to5 Google), Chrome’s calculator is accessible as a PWA. The new web calculator is not drastically different from the original app. It launches with a fairly simple interface — allowing for operations like addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication — that can be expanded to reveal advanced geometry and trigonometry tools.
You can access it by typing calculator.apps.chrome in your search bar. Just don’t expect any Material You design language (not yet, anyway) as the calculator is still sporting the older interface. That said, with all the evidence indicating that Google is bringing Material You to Chrome OS soon, it’s not hard to imagine that the Calculator app will eventually get revamped.
This change will allow anyone to use the calculator on just about any device, irrespective of OS — and since it’s just a calculator, Google’s made sure it’s fully functional even when offline. If you want to try out the new web app, especially on your phone, do note that it’s clearly still intended to be used on a computer (or at least a device in landscape mode), as accessing it in portrait produces a very unusable interface with some controls hidden.
This is just one of many changes that Google has working on in Chrome OS recently, including Self Share (still in development), offline grammar checking, and improved calendar quick view integration with Chrome OS. The platform can only move forward, so watch this space to keep up with what Google does next.
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