14 DAY TRIAL // Jolicould is one of the 'cloud' OS pioneers and had been around for some time before Google Chrome OS was even announced. Yet, these two competitors now have quite a lot in common, they both rely on Chromium technology to power web apps. Jolicloud has just announced that it has transitioned from the Mozilla Prism platform to Chromium for running all of the over 600 apps available in the Jolicloud App Center.
"[W]e released today our new Chrome-based web app platform. This platform will seamlessly replace Prism as a rendering engine for all web apps. As a Jolicloud user, the only thing you need to do is to update your system," Jolicloud announced.
"You can now enjoy the 600+ web apps available in our App Center with a faster, low memory footprint, and HTML5 ready browsing experience. With this new platform, Facebook Connect, Google account and Twitter connect authentification is shared across all the apps. If you also use Chrome or Firefox you can import your profiles," it added.
Jolicloud apps are all web-based, hence the 'cloud' in the name, so they need a browser to run on. Until now, the OS used Mozilla Prism, a Firefox/Gecko-based application that enables websites and apps to run, in a sense, as native apps on a desktop OS.
The move was announced a short while back and Jolicloud listed several reasons for switching platforms. Better JavaScript performance is one of them, but also a smaller memory footprint. Some HTML5 features that haven't been implemented in Gecko, Mozilla's web rendering engine, were also cited. However, Jolicloud says that the move doesn't affect Firefox's standing as the default browser.
For the users, the switch should be seamless and all they need to do is upgrade their install. Jolicloud has made sure that all the apps in the App Center are working properly on the new Chromium base.
All active development on Google Chrome is actually done for the Chromium project, the open-source web browser on which Chome is based. Jolicloud took the Chroumium source, but customized it to its own needs. It has now released its flavor of Chromium as Nickel, obviously, also an open-source project.