Will let web apps scan documents
Chromebooks didn’t exactly take the world by storm when they first hit the market. Far from being an instant hit, they were widely panned for their limited functionality. They have clearly come a long way since then, though. The over 2 million Chromebooks that were shipped in 2013 are a testament to how much Chrome OS has matured since its early days, when it was probably nothing more than an overhyped browser. Now, the cloud-based OS is all set to tick another key box: document scanning support.

“Basic document scanning in ChromeOS is going through the process of an API proposal,” wrote Chromium evangelist François Beaufort in a Google Plus post Friday. “It means it's getting closer and that the Chromium team loves to experiment wherever it can.”

The feature will tap into the Chome OS Lorgnette scanning API to detect USB- and LAN-attached scanners, acquire single-page scans, and posit the scanned images in the default download location. According to one description of the upcoming document scanning feature, it “can be extended to use native document acquisition APIs on other platforms.”