PC World - USA (2020-01)

Chromebooks such as the

Pixelbook Go offer native print management.

JANUARY 2020 PCWorld 21

management capabilities

It’s unclear if Google plans on building

any of these features into Android 11. So take

this as your warning to find a different

workflow for your Wi-Fi printing needs as well

as another reason to not depend on Google

services.

That’s 12 months away,
so it’s giving users lots of
time to find something
new, but it’s unlikely that
they’ll find anything as easy
and effortless as Cloud
Print. When you connect a
printer to your Google
Account via Chrome,
you’re basically able to
print from anywhere regardless of your location.
It was especially useful in the early days of
Chrome OS, when it was nearly impossible to
connect a printer any other way.
However, with native print management
on Chromebooks, Google feels like it’s time
to put Cloud Print out to pasture. In a support
document, it outlines several features
that are (or will be) available in Chrome
OS, including a few that are still in
development:

• Support for external CUPS
  print servers, including
  authentication


• Policy to configure
  connections to external CUPS
  print servers


• APIs for third-parties to
  access print job metadata,
  submit print jobs and printer

Google Cloud Print never made it out of beta.