11 December 2008 - Google releases Chrome

Digital Innovation Days

Google marked the release of its web browser on the 11th of December, 2008, when it launched the first stable public version of Chrome. Although the tech giant had previously released 3 versions for testing, they were beta versions. With the release of version 1, Chrome entered a market where users were growing frustrated with Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox was gaining momentum. By 2013, Chrome was dominating the web browser industry, clearly surpassing Internet Explorer and Firefox.

The software used certain features from Apple’s WebKit open-source rendering engine as well as Firefox, and its source code was made available by Google as part of its Chromium project. Google Chrome stood out due to a multitude of features. For starters, it strictly focused on web standards. This came at a time when Microsoft was struggling with proprietary web standards for its own web navigator, Internet Explorer. Chrome also introduced the idea of sandboxing in a web browser. By sandboxing individual tabs, if one of them crashed, the others would not be affected. This led to improved speed and stability although it required each tab to use as much dedicated memory as the first one. However, when any tab was closed, it released its allocated memory, effectively solving a problem many older browsers were facing and which could only be fixed by restarting them.

Today, Google Chrome is the undisputed leader in web browsers. With a market share of nearly 65%, it is the most popular web browser in 2021. It is more than just a web navigator now. In fact, it can be viewed as a complete platform that can run on different operating systems including Windows, Android, Linux, macOS, and iOS. From its release till now, Google Chrome has added value for the users and helped drive innovation in the field.