Google Chrome is a cross-platform web browser developed by Google. It was first released in 2008 for Microsoft Windows, built with free software components from Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox. Versions were later released for Linux, macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and also for Android, where it is the default browser. The browser is also the main component of ChromeOS, on which it serves as the platform for web applications.
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Logo used since February 2022 | |||||||||||
Screenshot of Google Chrome on Windows 10, showing the Main Page of the English Wikipedia | |||||||||||
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| Written in | C, C++, Assembly, HTML, Java (Android app only), JavaScript, Python | ||||||||||
| Engines | Blink (WebKit on iOS/iPadOS), V8 JavaScript engine | ||||||||||
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| Platform | IA-32, x86-64, ARMv7, ARMv8-A | ||||||||||
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| Predecessor | Google Toolbar | ||||||||||
| Available in | 47 languages | ||||||||||
| Type | Web browser, mobile browser | ||||||||||
| License | Proprietary freeware, based on open-source components | ||||||||||
| Website | google.com/chrome | ||||||||||
Most of Chrome's source code comes from Google's free and open-source software project called Chromium, but Chrome is licensed as proprietary freeware. WebKit was the original rendering engine, but Google eventually forked it to create the Blink engine; all Chrome variants except iOS used Blink as of 2017.
As of September 2025,[update] StatCounter estimates that Chrome has a 71.77% worldwide browser market share (after peaking at 72.38% in November 2018) on personal computers (PC), is most in use on tablets (having surpassed Safari), and is also dominant on smartphones. With a market share of 71.77% across all platforms combined, Chrome is the most used web browser in the world today.
Google chief executive Eric Schmidt was previously involved in the "browser wars" (a part of U.S. corporate history) and was against the expansion of the company into such a new area. However, Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page spearheaded a software demonstration that pushed Schmidt into making Chrome a core business priority, which resulted in commercial success. Because of the proliferation of Chrome, Google has expanded the "Chrome" brand name to other products. These include not just ChromeOS but also Chromecast, Chromebook, Chromebit, Chromebox, and Chromebase.
History
Google chief executive Eric Schmidt opposed the development of an independent web browser for six years. He stated that "at the time, Google was a small company", and he did not want to go through "bruising browser wars". Company co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page hired several Mozilla Firefox developers and built a demonstration of Chrome. Afterwards, Schmidt said, "It was so good that it essentially forced me to change my mind."
In September 2004, rumors of Google building a web browser first appeared. Online journals and U.S. newspapers stated at the time that Google was hiring former Microsoft web developers, among others. It also came shortly after the release of Mozilla Firefox 1.0, which was surging in popularity and taking market share from Internet Explorer, which had noted security problems.
Chrome is based on the open-source code of the Chromium project. Development of the browser began in 2006, spearheaded by Sundar Pichai.
Google has since become the world's most popular search engine. 90% of searches on search engines come from Google users
Announcement
The release announcement was originally scheduled for September 3, 2008, and a comic by Scott McCloud was to be sent to journalists and bloggers explaining the features within the new browser. Copies intended for Europe were shipped early, and German blogger Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped made a scanned copy of the 38-page comic available on his website after receiving it on September 1, 2008. Google subsequently made the comic available on Google Books, and mentioned it on their official blog along with an explanation for the early release. The product was named "Chrome" as an initial development project code name, because it is associated with fast cars and speed. Google kept the development project name as the final release name, as a "cheeky" or ironic moniker, as one of the main aims was to minimize the user interface chrome.
Public release
The browser was first publicly released, officially as a beta version, on September 2, 2008, for Windows XP and newer, and with support for 43 languages, and later as a "stable" public release on December 11, 2008. On that same day, a CNET news item drew attention to a passage in the Terms of Service statement for the initial beta release, which seemed to grant Google a license to all content transferred via the Chrome browser. This passage was inherited from the general Google terms of service. Google responded to this criticism immediately by stating that the language used was borrowed from other products, and removed this passage from the Terms of Service.
Chrome quickly gained about 1% usage share. After the initial surge, usage share dropped until it hit a low of 0.69% in October 2008. It then started rising again and by December 2008, Chrome again passed the 1% threshold. In early January 2009, CNET reported that Google planned to release versions of Chrome for macOS and Linux in the first half of the year. The first official macOS and Linux developer previews of Chrome were announced on June 4, 2009, with a blog post saying they were missing many features and were intended for early feedback rather than general use. In December 2009, Google released beta versions of Chrome for macOS and Linux. Google Chrome 5.0, announced on May 25, 2010, was the first stable release to support all three platforms.
Chrome was one of the twelve browsers offered on BrowserChoice.eu to European Economic Area users of Microsoft Windows in 2010.
Development
Chrome was assembled from 25 different code libraries from Google and third parties such as Mozilla's Netscape Portable Runtime, Network Security Services, NPAPI (dropped as of version 45), Skia Graphics Engine, SQLite, and several other open-source projects. The V8 JavaScript virtual machine was considered a sufficiently important project to be split off (as was Adobe/Mozilla's Tamarin) and handled by a separate team in Denmark coordinated by Lars Bak. According to Google, existing implementations were designed "for small programs, where the performance and interactivity of the system weren't that important", but web applications such as Gmail "are using the web browser to the fullest when it comes to DOM manipulations and JavaScript", and therefore would significantly benefit from a JavaScript engine that could work faster.
Chrome initially used the WebKit rendering engine to display web pages. In 2013, they forked the WebCore component to create their own layout engine, Blink. Based on WebKit, Blink only uses WebKit's "WebCore" components, while substituting other components, such as its own multi-process architecture, in place of WebKit's native implementation. Chrome is internally tested with unit testing, automated testing of scripted user actions, fuzz testing, as well as WebKit's layout tests (99% of which Chrome is claimed to have passed), and against commonly accessed websites inside the Google index within 20–30 minutes. Google created Gears for Chrome, which added features for web developers typically relating to the building of web applications, including offline support. Google phased out Gears as the same functionality became available in the HTML5 standards.
In March 2011, Google introduced a new simplified logo to replace the previous 3D logo that had been used since the project's inception. Google designer Steve Rura explained the company's reasoning for the change: "Since Chrome is all about making your web experience as easy and clutter-free as possible, we refreshed the Chrome icon to better represent these sentiments. A simpler icon embodies the Chrome spirit – to make the web quicker, lighter, and easier for all."
On January 11, 2011, the Chrome product manager, Mike Jazayeri, announced that Chrome would remove H.264 video codec support for its HTML5 player, citing the desire to bring Google Chrome more in line with the currently available open codecs available in the Chromium project, which Chrome is based on. Despite this, on November 6, 2012, Google released a version of Chrome on Windows which added hardware-accelerated H.264 video decoding. In October 2013, Cisco announced that it was open-sourcing its H.264 codecs, and it would cover all fees required.
On February 7, 2012, Google launched Google Chrome Beta for Android 4.0 devices. On many new devices with Android 4.1 or later preinstalled, Chrome is the default browser. In May 2017, Google announced a version of Chrome for augmented reality and virtual reality devices.
Features
Google Chrome features a minimalistic user interface, with its user-interface principles later being implemented in other browsers. For example, the merging of the address bar and search bar into the omnibox or omnibar.
Web standards support
The first release of Google Chrome passed both the Acid1 and Acid2 tests. Beginning with version 4.0, Chrome passed all aspects of the Acid3 test, However, as of April 2017 Chrome no longer passes Acid3 due to changing consensus on Web standards.
As of May 2011,[update] Chrome has very good support for JavaScript/ECMAScript according to Ecma International's ECMAScript standards conformance Test 262 (version ES5.1 May 18, 2012). This test reports as the final score the number of tests a browser failed; hence, lower scores are better. In this test, Chrome version 37 scored 10 failed/11,578 passed. For comparison, Firefox 19 scored 193 failed/11,752 passed, and Internet Explorer 9 had a score of 600+ failed, while Internet Explorer 10 had a score of 7 failed.
In 2011, on the official CSS 2.1 test suite by the standardization organization W3C, WebKit, the Chrome rendering engine, passed 89.75% (89.38% out of 99.59% covered) CSS 2.1 tests.
On the HTML5 web standards test, Chrome 41 scored 518 out of 555 points, placing it ahead of the five most popular desktop browsers. Chrome 41 on Android scored 510 out of 555 points. Chrome 44 scored 526, only 29 points less than the maximum score.
User interface
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