Chrome, Google’s very own web browser, was released in September 2008 as a beta version for Windows-only download. Google Chrome uses the ‘WebKit‘ layout engine and application framework. The Chrome name was derived from the graphical user interface frame, or “chrome”, of web browsers.

Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimalistic design with sophisticated technology to make it able render the web faster & safer. The browser came with several forward-thinking features, like having each tab exist as its own process, as well as the capability to drag it outside of the browser to become its own new window. It also made every new tab its own start page with some of the most recently and frequently visited sites showing up in screenshot thumbnail.

Google Chrome, being an open source application, released its entire source code (mostly C++ & Assembly), including its bespoke V8 JavaScript engine as an open source project entitled Chromium. This move enabled third-party developers to port the browser to the Linux and Mac OS X platforms, apart from being able to study the underlying source code.

Google hope that other web browsers will adopt V8 to help web applications run smoothly across most web browsers, which in turn help move the web forward. The Google-authored portion of Chromium is released under the permissive BSD license, which allows portions to be incorporated into both open source and proprietary software programs. Other portions of the source code are subject to a variety of different open-source licenses. Chromium implements the same feature set as Chrome, but has a slightly different logo.

Being the 4th most used web browsers in the world with 2.6% share and climbing up, makes us web developers & web designers to pay attention in testing our created websites if it works smoothly as expected in Google Chrome.