SplashTop Hooks Up With Bing, Chromium

It was precisely one month ago I was wondering what happened to SplashTop and found the company that we jump-started by our first-in-the-world coverage was still pushing out their instant-on Linux OS to various OEM vendors but they have lost their roots of using the Linux environment embedded on a motherboard's flash chip to instead being nestled away on the user's hard drive, which defeats much of its uniqueness and benefits (not to mention it was hacked by Phoronix readers). SplashTop, which was formerly named DeviceVM before the company took up the same name as their premiere product, also started pushing out Apple iPad applications in recent months. Today the company is announcing another set of peculiar changes to their instant-on Linux OS.

Most notably, SplashTop is ditching their Mozilla Gecko-based Firefox web-browser and Google Search in favor of the Chromium web-browser and Microsoft's Bing, respectively. Microsoft and SplashTop have announced a partnership today and separately they've decided to now based their web-browser on the open-source version of Google Chrome (Chromium) and abandon their Mozilla ties after three years.

The other announcement coming out of SplashTop is announcing their own SplashTop OS that they are offering themselves for anyone to download and it's not tied to a particular PC or vendor's products. Their own-branded OS is now available as a free beta while the general availability is expected in early 2011. Of course, if you were one of the Phoronix readers to hack SplashTop you could have previously been running SplashTop off a USB drive if you so wish, but there isn't too much benefit to going with SplashTop OS these days when most other Linux distributions offer more features and are similarly focused upon a quick-booting experience.

Today's SplashTop announcements can be read on their blog. There's also the SplashTop beta page for installing the beta version of their Bing+Chromium-ified SplashTop OS, but it must be installed via Microsoft Windows.