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. 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. Chrome was 'largely developed' in Google's Kitchener office. ĭevelopment of the browser began in 2006, spearheaded by Sundar Pichai. 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. newspapers stated at the time that Google was hiring former Microsoft web developers among others. In September 2004, rumors of Google building a web browser first appeared. After co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page hired several Mozilla Firefox developers and built a demonstration of Chrome, Schmidt said that 'It was so good that it essentially forced me to change my mind.' He stated that 'at the time, Google was a small company', and he did not want to go through 'bruising browser wars'. Google CEO Eric Schmidt opposed the development of an independent web browser for six years. Because of this success, Google has expanded the 'Chrome' brand name to other products: ChromeOS, Chromecast, Chromebook, Chromebit, Chromebox, and Chromebase. Īs of October 2022, StatCounter estimates that Chrome has a 67% worldwide browser market share (after peaking at 72.38% in November 2018) on personal computers (PC), is most used on tablets (having surpassed Safari), and is also dominant on smartphones and at 65% across all platforms combined, making it the most used web browser in the world today. 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. Most of Chrome's source code comes from Google's free and open-source software project Chromium, but Chrome is licensed as proprietary freeware. The browser is also the main component of ChromeOS, where it serves as the platform for web applications. Versions were later released for Linux, macOS, iOS, and also for Android, where it is the default browser. It was first released in 2008 for Microsoft Windows, built with free software components from Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox. Google Chrome is a cross-platform web browser developed by Google.

Proprietary freeware, based on open source components Yes, I can simply re-install Google Chrome, but I would have to remember doing this every once in a while, which is a pain, I simply can't believe that there is not at least a Settings switch to Clear app versions.Beta / September 2, 2008 15 years ago ( )ġ.0 / December 11, 2008 14 years ago ( ) Therefore, the problem I am facing now is that even though the contents of the Google Chrome app are of reasonable size again, the app package is still 5 GB large.(I am guessing it's a sort of zip archive that won't shrink automatically?) Alright, so I have to manually delete old Google Chrome versions from inside the app? Why is Google Chrome not deleting old versions itself?ĭoing this actually does reduce the Contents folder to about 190 MB, but the.app package and found a Versions folder containing Google Chrome versions dating back to 2013 (31.0). (Remember, I am not talking about the browser cache or RAM allocation, but simply the app itself.) I couldn't believe what I found: The Google Chrome.app takes over 5 GB on my hard-drive (Mac OS X Yosemite 10.10.2). I recently scanned my hard-drive looking for things that are taking up too much space.

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