I don’t know how many of our readers have checked out, or even heard of the cloud OS, Jolicloud ? Well basically it’s a really cool netbook operating system built on Ubuntu 9.10, and lives in the clouds. It’s tweaked Ubuntu with a special minimalistic interface that enables netbooks, and other low powered laptops to run smoothly. Up until now it relied on a specially packaged Mozilla Prism to run all its web applications.

But just yesterday the open source team at Jolicloud released a new Chrome-based web app platform, eliminating the Mozilla platform, and using Google’s. Now you can use the over 600+ web apps available in their app center at a faster speed, smaller footprint, and now will include a rich HTML5 browsing experience. This is a true cloud OS experience, they offer everything from Twitter to Facebook, to Last F.M. and Boxee. There are tons of lesser known apps out there for your business needs, graphic design and even light gaming.

It is interesting that they decided to go with Google, when the Chrome OS is due to come out this year. They had to design a special custom version based on the Chromium open source code, which they named “Nickel”. Jolicloud has excellent support for tons of hardware, they designed it for netbooks, but trust me it runs perfectly on laptops.

I have used Joliclould  for a while on my Compaq c751NR, and it installed with no issues, and all drivers work including WiFi.  The other neat thing is that they have a Windows installer, that you can run on Windows 7 or Windows XP and it automatically installs Jolicloud right next to your Windows OS, kinda like Wubi does for Ubuntu. You can check out the new relaunched Jolicloud here and for a full depth article about the switch to Chrome, check out ReadWriteWeb.