Chrome 155 just rolled out for Googlebook, and it quietly removes one of the platform’s most annoying limits. Until now, Chrome on Googlebook would only let you install a site as a standalone app if the site’s developer had bothered to ship an installable web manifest. Everything else opened as just another browser tab with a shortcut icon stuck to it. That restriction is gone.
What changed in Chrome 155
Google had called the manifest requirement a “conscious design choice” for Googlebook, the Android-based laptop platform that launched alongside the usual Chromebook lineup last month. Robby Payne at Chrome Unboxed, who first reported the change on October 14, says user pushback is what moved Google off that stance. Now any page, whether it’s your bank’s login screen or a web tool with no manifest at all, can become a real window with its own icon in the launcher.
Installed sites still run inside Chrome under the hood, so they keep your Google account session, cookies, saved passwords, and whatever extensions you already have installed. That’s not quite the same as a native app, but for a lot of everyday sites, a dedicated window that doesn’t get buried in a pile of browser tabs is most of what people actually wanted.
One smaller change ships in the same update: Chrome’s settings page now opens in a regular browser tab instead of the full-screen, mobile-style panel Googlebook used before. It’s a minor tweak, but it brings Googlebook’s settings a step closer to how desktop ChromeOS already works.
Why this only applies to Googlebook, for now
This change is specific to Googlebook hardware, not the ChromeOS Chromebooks most readers here already own. Googlebook runs Chrome on top of an Android-based architecture that’s different from classic ChromeOS, and Google has been treating the new platform as a separate testbed for changes like this one. Regular Chromebooks still follow the older rule: a site needs its own web manifest before you can install it as a PWA, or you fall back to pinning it as a plain shortcut on your shelf instead.
Whether this install-anything behavior ever reaches ChromeOS proper is an open question. Given how much of Googlebook’s early groundwork is expected to eventually feed back into Chromebooks, I wouldn’t bet against it, but Google hasn’t said anything about a timeline for that.
What Chromebook owners should do
If you already own a Googlebook, check for the update now instead of waiting for it to arrive on its own. Open the Play Store, search for Chrome, and tap Update if it’s listed there, since the rollout is staggered and hasn’t reached every device yet. Once you’re on version 155.0.8059.79 or later, go back through any site you’d already turned into a browser-tab shortcut and reinstall it properly through the three-dot menu. The old launch-week shortcuts don’t upgrade themselves, so they’ll keep opening as plain tabs until you redo them.
If you’re still on a regular Chromebook, there’s nothing new to install here yet. But the gap between the two platforms is worth noticing if you’ve been reading the early Googlebook reviews and wondering what you’d actually gain by switching. This isn’t a headline feature, just a small, practical difference in how the two devices handle the websites you already use every day. Those small differences are usually the ones that add up over a year of actual use, long after the launch coverage has moved on.
