Chrome could be releasing support for one of Android 12 features
A long-overdue improvement would appear to be coming to Google Chrome supporting Android 12's scrolling screenshot. We’ve been waiting forever for Google to add this feature into Android, and it finally seems to be coming to Android 12.
Android 12 first introduced this long-requested feature. However, it doesn’t work on all apps yet. And your Chrome browser is probably one of the essential apps that you’ll want to use this feature on. Luckily, it looks like it will soon be able to support it.
Chrome Story spotted Google’s efforts to include scrolling screenshots last year, and since then, we have kept our eyes on this development. There are a few workaround ways that you can enable this feature. One such way is to allow it through a flag on Google Chrome 92, but even this method doesn’t work 100%. Also, finding any info on when it might be available, and working, was very hard to come by. So much so that many experts thought that Google had abandoned the feature totally.
Android’s system is more robust and reliable but unfortunately does not work on all apps yet. However, XDA’s Mishaal Rahman recently unearthed a new commit on Chromium Gerrit, which points to Chrome supporting scrolling screenshots once implemented. As explained by Mishaal, the way that Android 12 performs the scrolling screenshot is a double-edged sword, as it works very differently from how many OEMs implement their screenshot systems. It takes advantage of an Android app's View function instead of capturing and stitching multiple images.
Google recommends that developers take advantage of Android’s ScrollCapture API to ensure that the scrolling screenshot feature will work on their apps. It is exactly this API that Google Chrome is using to support scrolling screenshots.
Closing words
Rolling screenshots is a welcomed feature to Google Chrome and will solve the issue of capturing and managing multiple screenshots of a webpage. With the release of Android 12 looming, hopefully, we don’t have to wait too long before seeing this feature on Android devices. I am looking forward to testing out the feature myself. For others who are also eager to start testing this out, it should appear on the Canary channel first.