Newsletter
Downloading files on Google Drive for the web just got easier, as Google has announced a handful of improvements to the web version of the app. Google also notes that the improvements help downloading entire folders too so if you typically don’t download single files, you’ll still be able to benefit from this most recent set of changes. It’s worth noting that these changes won’t be available to everyone immediately, and instead will take the next few weeks to roll out. In addition to that, these are changes which are targeted at Google Apps customers, but the changes will impact all end users so anyone who uses Drive will notice the changes soon enough.
As for what actually has been improved, Google highlights that it’s now possible to take items and compress them into multiple 2GB sized ZIP folders. You can also download items into multiple 2GB ZIP folders as well. If the folders you’re trying to ZIP and send contain any empty folders, Drive will now include these. For example, you might be sending off a folder to a colleague that contains mostly a bunch of files, but it might also contain some empty named folders in which that colleague is supposed to fill with some files of their own.
If you use Drive for storing and sharing Google Forms, handling these forms has now been improved so the experiences with forms should be better overall. Alongside the functional changes there are a handful of small visual tweaks to the UI that have been made which you may or may not notice right away. This includes moving the “New” button from the panel on the left side up into the tool bar where the “Drive” logo used to be and changing the color from a red to a blue. The Search bar is longer than it was before and also no longer has the blue search icon at the end of it. There are also some new buttons in the side panel, and although these are likely the most minor tweaks, Google has made slight adjustments to the positioning and size of the toolbar.