If you use Chrome OS after being familiar with Windows, you may notice that, currently, there's no quick way to see your calendar. While Chrome OS has a similar system tray to Windows, the bottom-right corner only shows you the time, not the current date. A few months ago, hints that Google was working on a calendar widget for Chrome OS started to appear, and now those hints are getting clearer.

Based on recent changes in the Chromium Gerrit, spotted by 9to5Google, Google is working on a new calendar widget for Chrome OS, complete with Google Calendar integration. The widget will live next in the system tray, where the current time is also shown. You'll apparently be able to open the calendar widget from the quick actions panel, but there's also a keyboard shortcut associated with it: Alt + Shift + C.

This is all associated with a Chrome flag called Productivity experiment: Monthly Calendar View. You can find this flag by going to chrome://flags, and the description reads as follows:

Show Monthly Calendar View with Google Calendar events to increase productivity by helping users view their schedules more quickly.

#calendar-view

As described in the flag, the Google Calendar integration means you can see your upcoming events much more easily, which is probably why this is labeled as a productivity experiment. Being able to plan for upcoming meetings is certainly a useful feature, and it's good to see that it's being added to Chrome OS. Over on Windows, Microsoft also offers integration with the Calendar app for a similar purpose.

Since it's an experiment, it's not guaranteed that the flag will result in this feature being added anytime soon - or at all -though it wouldn't make much sense for it to be scrapped. The flag is set to expire with Chrome OS version 103, which is still a ways off. The current stable release of Chrome OS is version 92, and new versions are released every month or so. The finalized feature could show up anytime between now and then.