It appears Google Chromebook laptops won’t be able to dual-boot Windows 10 after all. Word of the much-talked of Project Campfire functionality emerged last year and brought with it much excitement for expanding the functionality of Google’s laptop range.
However, judging by ‘comments and code removals’ on Chromium (via 9to5Google), it appears Google is dousing the prospect of Project Campfire coming to fruition.
Although things had gone a little quiet on this front, according to those who pay close attention to the Chromium commits, it was still expected Google would enable Chromebook users to reboot their notebooks into Windows 10 or Linux at some point.
However, the writing may have been on the wall when Google I/O came and went earlier this month without a mention of the project. In fact, Google has never acknowledged the existence of the project publicly.
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The changes to the Chromium project were first spotted by Reddit user crosfrog, who’d been on the lookout for dual-boot news. Here’s a screenshot showing the depreciation (via AboutChromebooks).
Image credit: Reddit user crosfrog
Another user superlinkx, added: “Considering it was never officially announced, I wouldn’t expect an official cancellation. This certainly seems to indicate that the experiment has been killed off. The fact they didn’t discuss it at I/O was a pretty big clue that it wasn’t in a good place.”
It’s unclear why Google has chosen to cancel the project, but it may be the limited ability to run the feature on all Chromebooks, rather than all of them. Although Chromebooks are getting a lot more powerful, much of the range is still low-powered and less capable of running Windows 10 effectively.
It may be that Google has decided that if it doesn’t work for all Chromebooks, it won’t work for anyone, but still this would have been a nice addition to the functionality of the Chrome OS-based laptops.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
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