Chromium OS’ (or Chrome OS as Google will market it) source code has been released. This is not a beta, nor a alpha. It is a pre-alpha product.

Now one of Chromium OS’ main goals is to be fast and Google has done that. Now how Google did this is to work with the manufactures. Google has a requirement list so that it will work correctly. One of those requirements is to have a flash based hard-drive. Google will also have the manufactures have a custom BIOS and firmware. This makes a 7 second boot time possible.

One part of the speed is to have a really fast boot time. Chromium OS right now has a 7 second boot time. How did they do this? Well what they did was remove one of the main things in booting, the BIOS. What the BIOS does is it searches for operating systems and tests hardware. Now what Google has replaced it with is custom firmware that all it does is start the OS and then let the OS do the hardware testing.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTFfl7AjNfI]

Chromium OS Boot Screen

Now another part is the cloud. All of the user data and settings are saved in the cloud (you use your Google account to login). You can hop onto another Chromium OS computer and login to your Google account and all of your tabs and settings are there ready to use.

The OS has had many features put into security and updates. Google says that if the OS trys to download malware a simple restart will clear the malware and all user settings will still be intact (because they are stored in the cloud. Google also says that the OS won’t nag about updates, it will just install them. After installation a restart will activate the updates. One thing is if the OS will nag about restarting or just show a message saying that after the next restart the updates will be avaliable.

Now Chromium OS is expected to be released later next year and will be available in netbooks. Right now you can download the source at the Chromium website.