Google Chrome — Announced in a Comic, It Redrew the Browser Map

Google Chrome is Google's web browser. It began on 2 September 2008, when a beta for Windows was released in more than 100 countries. The first stable release, without the beta label, followed on 11 December 2008, and the first stable versions for Mac and Linux on 25 May 2010.

The announcement came a day before the beta, on 1 September 2008. On its official blog Google admitted that a comic book introducing the browser had been sent out early, published the comic, and said the beta would launch the next day. The post was signed by Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management, and Linus Upson, engineering director.

A browser announced in a comic

The post opened with a joke: Google has a saying, "launch early and iterate", and it apparently applied to the mailroom as well. The post was later updated to add a link to the comic.

The comic, published on Google Books, is credited with words by the Google Chrome team and comics adaptation by Scott McCloud, and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5.

What was new

The blog said the web had evolved from simple text pages into rich, interactive applications, so Google had rethought the browser from the ground up. It named three pillars.

The window itself was kept spare. Most people, the post argued, care about the pages and applications rather than the browser, and it called Chrome "clean and fast". It also said plainly that Chrome used components from Apple's WebKit and Mozilla's Firefox, among others.

The code, as Chromium

On the same day, 2 September, Ben Goodger wrote on the Chromium blog that all of the code was being released as open source under a permissive BSD licence. The open-source project was named Chromium, after the metal used to make chrome. Goodger said open-source projects such as Firefox and WebKit had led the way on next-generation web technologies and Google wanted to follow suit, and he was frank that a richer web, in which people do more online and so use more Google services, also benefited the company.

According to Wikipedia, most of Chrome's source code comes from Chromium, while Chrome itself is distributed as proprietary freeware. On 3 April 2013 the Chromium project announced Blink, a new rendering engine forked from WebKit. Chromium's different multi-process architecture had made both projects more complex, and the announcement said Blink would allow it to remove seven build systems and more than 7,000 files, comprising more than 4.5 million lines, right away.

Chrome by date

From browser to operating system

On 7 July 2009 Google announced the Google Chrome OS, an operating system built around the browser. The post said that nine months after launch, more than 30 million people were already using Chrome regularly. Chrome OS would be a lightweight system running Chrome on top of a Linux kernel, aimed first at netbooks, with machines expected in the second half of 2010. For the products that followed, see Chromebook.

The most used browser

On StatCounter's worldwide figures across all devices (desktop, mobile, tablet and console), Chrome reached 29.15% in May 2012, passing Internet Explorer's 28.87% for the first time. On desktop alone it took the lead the same month, 32.43% to 32.12%. It had already passed Firefox on desktop in November 2011 (for that story see Firefox 1.0).

The gap has since grown wide. In September 2026 StatCounter's all-device figures put Chrome at 66.45% and second-placed Safari at 18.20%. On desktop alone Chrome had 65.14%, followed by Microsoft Edge at 14.64%, and Edge itself is one of the Chromium-based browsers Wikipedia lists alongside Brave, Opera and Vivaldi.

The antitrust case and the demand to sell

Chrome's reach was tested head-on in the case the US Justice Department and the states brought against Google's search monopoly. In August 2024 the district court found that Google had unlawfully monopolised markets including general search services. At the remedies stage the plaintiffs asked for an immediate divestiture of Chrome. According to the Congressional Research Service, they argued that Chrome accounted for 20% of all searches in the United States and used Google Search as its default, so separating it would open a critical access point to rival search engines.

On 2 September 2025 the court rejected that demand. CRS gives four grounds: the plaintiffs had not shown that behavioural remedies would be inadequate; they had not shown a causal connection strong enough to justify structural relief; a divestiture would reach beyond the conduct at issue, not least because most of Chrome's users are outside the United States; and Chrome depends so heavily on Google's systems and staff that separating it would be "incredibly messy and highly risky". Instead the court barred exclusive contracts relating to the distribution of Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant and the Gemini app, and required Google to share certain search index and user-interaction data with rivals (per the Justice Department's announcement).

According to Wikipedia, on 12 August 2025, before the ruling, the AI company Perplexity had offered to buy Chrome for US$34.5 billion.

Both sides appealed. But the brief the Justice Department and the states filed with the appeals court on 28 July 2026 states that the plaintiffs do not cross-appeal the divestiture ruling. As of October 2026 Chrome remains with Google.

For the wider story see the internet and web timeline; for the company, Google; and for search, Google Search.