Stadia is approaching its first anniversary in just a few weeks, and though the cloud gaming service has grown a lot in the past year, there’s still plenty to improve upon — especially when it comes to browser support. A new Chrome extension called Stadia Enhanced aims to address some of those pain points by adding a bunch of useful tweaks and enabling cool customization features that Google has neglected to add itself.
Stadia Enhanced solves what, to me, is the most obvious problem on desktop: there’s no way to search for a specific game in the Stadia store. How Google, a search company, has neglected to put a search bar on the Stadia Store website for this long is beyond me, but this extension remedies that by putting it right at the top of the page.
You can even filter results based on current sales and deals.
The extension packs in plenty of other handy tweaks, too. It allows you to choose your preferred codec (VP9 or H264), enable 2K and 4K streaming (depending on your GPU), and quickly access things like screenshots, video captures, achievements, and stream stats like FPS and latency. Even browsing through your library of games is better thanks to a customizable grid layout that lets you see more than two games at a time.
Left: Default two-column grid Right: Enhanced six-column grid
Stats like FPS, latency, and dropped frames appear in the top left corner.
Stadia Enhanced is completely free to use, and it’s also open source. You can peruse the code, read the changelog, and report current issues over on the project’s GitHub page. If you want to try it out for yourself, head to the Chrome Web Store and install Stadia Enhanced today. It’s definitely a useful extension if you’re serious about Stadia. Even Artem likes it!
