Google has posted a Chrome OS FAQ, in which it lists its partners for the new operating system. This features the usual suspects in terms of PC and hardware vendors – though no Dell as yet – but with one interesting addition. Adobe:

The Google Chrome OS team is currently working with a number of technology companies to design and build devices that deliver an extraordinary end user experience. Among others, these companies include Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba.

Adobe is the only pure software company listed. What is the significance? My assumption is that Google intends its Chrome OS to work well with Adobe Flash, needed for compatibility with a zillion web sites out there, and to support multimedia such as the BBC iPlayer. Adobe will also want to get its offline, desktop runtime, called AIR, onto the device; and seeing the company named here makes that even more likely. Put this together with Chrome’s fast JavaScript engine and innovations like O3D – hardware-accelerated graphics for the browser – and my guess is that this will make an excellent platform for Rich Internet Applications and multimedia.

If there is a war between HTML 5 and Flash, Google is more aligned with HTML 5; but that won’t get in the way of excellent Flash support in Chrome OS.