Google Chrome is a freeware web browser developed by Google that uses the WebKit layout engine until version 27 and, with the exception of its iOS releases, from version 28 and beyond the WebKit fork Blink. It was released as a beta version for Microsoft Windows on September 2, 2008, and as a stable public release on December 11, 2008.
Net Applications has indicated that Chrome is the third-most popular web browser when it comes to the size of its user base, behind Internet Explorer and Firefox. StatCounter, however, estimates that Google Chrome has a 39% worldwide usage share of web browsers making it the most widely used web browser in the world.
In September 2008, Google released the majority of Chrome's source code as an open source project called Chromium, on which Chrome releases are still based.
Features
Google Chrome aims to be secure, fast, simple and stable. There are extensive differences from its peers in Chrome's minimalistic user interface, which is atypical of modern web browsers. For example, Chrome does not render RSS feeds. One of Chrome's strengths is its application performance and JavaScript processing speed, both of which were independently verified by multiple websites to be the swiftest among the major browsers of its time. Many of Chrome's unique features had been previously announced by other browser developers, but Google was the first to implement and publicly release them. For example, a prominent graphical user interface (GUI) innovation, the merging of the address bar and search bar (the Omnibox), was first announced by Mozilla in May 2008 as a planned feature for Firefox.[130] Both Internet Explorer 9 and Safari (version 6) have since merged the search and address bar.
