The latest version of the Jolicloud netbook operating system is now available for download.And as expected, it changes the rendering engine for web-based applications from Mozilla to Chrome. One of the things that makes Jolicloud stand out is the fact that you can install either native Linux applications or web-based apps like twitter, Gmail, or Facebook. When you install a web app, a shortcut shows up in your program launcher, and hitting the shortcut brings up a single-purpose web browser that will take you to that application.
Up until today, Jolicloud used Mozilla Prism to achieve this effect. Prism is basically a platform for creating desktop versions of web apps that will launch in a stripped down, Firefox-like browser. The new version of Jolicloud instead uses the Google Chrome browser’s capabilities to do much the same thing. Jolicloud says this should help reduce the amount of memory needed by each application while making apps launch faster.
The default web browser in Jolicloud is still Firefox.
Existing Jolicloud users can upgrade the operating system just by clicking the “update” button.
how do you get rid of firefox?
Decided to give this a try, it’s pretty interesting and works really well on my SU2300.
Going with chromium gives your webapps much better file I/O, making it feel more instant and responsive. Ironically Google Gear doesn’t support Chrome or Chromium in Linux, so Docs/Gmail are stripped of offline support now.
Side note: it’s basically based off of Ubuntu. It uses gnome and most of the typical gnome applications, can use the same packages as Ubuntu. So anyone familiar with Ubuntu can mess with the internals of Jolicloud.
The ubuntu-desktop package is even in the repositories.