Chromium Blog: What's the Difference Between Chromium OS and Google Chrome OS?

Chromium Blog

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What's the Difference Between Chromium OS and Google Chrome OS?

Friday, December 11, 2009

The last couple of weeks since we open sourced Chromium OS have been pretty exciting. The discussion groups have been buzzing and a number of sites have put up Chromium OS builds for download. While we're happy that developers have been building Chromium OS there are a few things we would like to clarify:

This is not ready for consumers yet — everything you see can and probably will change by the time Google Chrome OS-based devices are available late next year.
Please note that Google has not released an official binary for Chromium OS and therefore if you download Chromium OS binaries please ensure that you trust the site you are downloading them from.
While we will try our best to help you through the Chromium discussion forums, we will not be officially supporting any of these builds. Remember that you are downloading that specific site/developer's build of Chromium OS.

We have also received a number of questions that we wanted to answer directly and so we put together the following FAQ to clarify some of these issues.
One of the top questions has been around the distinction between Google Chrome OS and Chromium OS. Google Chrome OS is to Chromium OS what Google Chrome browser is to Chromium. Chromium OS is the open source project, used primarily by developers, with code that is available for anyone to checkout, modify and build their own version with. Meanwhile, Google Chrome OS is the Google product that OEMs will ship on Netbooks next year. Therefore, dear developers who have built and posted Chromium OS binaries, you're awesome and we appreciate what you are doing, however we have to ask you to call the binaries you've put up for download "Chromium OS" and not "Google Chrome OS".
Thanks!Posted by Martin Bligh, Software Engineer