Google Chrome

Description

For years, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt refused to make a browser. He believed it would entangle the company in a resource-draining fight it didn’t need to be in. Sergey Brin and Larry Page did not agree. Google’s entire business relied on people using a browser to access Google Search, and in 2008 that browser was Internet Explorer — a product that Microsoft had barely updated in years, and one that was increasingly struggling to handle the type of dynamic web applications Google was building.

The two co-founders pushed until Schmidt relented. Google built a team that included developers that were poached from Firefox and Netscape. On September 2, 2008, Chrome released in beta for Windows. It started with 0.3% market share. By May 2012, it had passed Internet Explorer to become the most used browser in the world. By January 2026, according to StatCounter, its global share was 71%.

Chrome is now the default browser on Android, the basis for ChromeOS, and the browser against which every other browser is compared. Most of its source code is derived from the open-source Chromium project, but Chrome itself is freeware. On iOS, Chrome is built on WebKit, because Apple requires it, but everywhere else, it runs on Google’s Blink rendering engine and V8 JavaScript engine, both of which Google forked from Apple’s WebKit project in 2013.

Major versions are released every four weeks.

WHAT MADE IT WIN

Chrome did two things differently when it was launched. First, it executed each tab as a separate process. If one tab crashed, the others continued to work. That seems obvious now, but back in 2008 it wasn’t the way browsers worked. Second, it shipped with a JavaScript engine, V8, which was dramatically faster than anything else available. Web apps such as Gmail and Google Maps ran significantly better in Chrome than in competing browsers.

The interface was minimal by the standards of the day. No menu bar, no sidebar, tabs right at the top of the window. Google called it “the chrome” — as in the visual frame around the content — and tried deliberately to make it go away.

Speed and simplicity was the pitch. They worked.

PROFILES AND SYNC

Chrome supports multiple user profiles within the same installation, each of which is isolated with its own bookmarks, history, passwords, extensions, and settings. Signing into a Google account synchronizes all of that on every device that runs Chrome — Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS. For users who work at multiple machines, this makes the browser relatively stateless: sit down anywhere, sign in, and it’s all there.

Guest mode is a temporary session that does not leave anything behind when the window closes. Incognito mode keeps a browsing session off the local history and clears cookies when the window closes, but it doesn’t hide activity from websites, employers, or internet service providers – something Chrome’s own Incognito warning makes clear.

Google’s enterprise offering, Chrome for Work, adds IT management via Google Admin. Administrators can enforce policies, control what extensions users can install, and set security policies across a fleet of managed devices.

GEMINI AND AI FEATURES

In September 2025, Google announced what it called the biggest upgrade in Chrome’s history and it wasn’t by chance. Two weeks previously, a federal judge had ruled that Google could keep Chrome after the US Department of Justice’s antitrust case – the DOJ had sought a forced sale of the browser, and Perplexity AI had bid $34.5 billion to buy it. With that threat eliminated, Google acted quickly.

Gemini, Google’s AI model, has now been made directly available in Chrome for US desktop users on Windows and macOS. A toolbar button opens a Gemini panel that can summarize the current page, answer questions about the content on the page, and work across multiple open tabs simultaneously to pull together information from multiple sources at once. The address bar acquired an AI Mode that doesn’t send users to a search results page, but instead handles complicated, multi-part queries. Gemini also integrates with Google Calendar, YouTube and Docs — from a web page mentioning a concert, a user can ask Gemini to add the date directly to their calendar.

Future releases will expand the capabilities of Gemini to “agentic” tasks: multi-step automated actions such as ordering tickets or filling in forms. Google describes these as making multi-step tasks a single request. The rollout began in the US and is moving to other regions and to mobile.

Safe Browsing’s Enhanced Protection mode also got some AI improvements in 2025. Android Chrome users now get about three billion fewer scam and spam notifications each day thanks to better filtering, and Enhanced Protection can now detect tech support scams, fake antivirus pages and attempts to impersonate brands — threats it previously missed.

TAB MANAGEMENT

Tab Groups allow users to give a name and colour to a group of related tabs, then collapse the group into one item in the tab bar. Groups survive between browser sessions. Reading List saves pages to return to later without opening a full bookmark.

Memory Saver, introduced in 2025, suspends inactive tabs to free RAM. It has three modes — Moderate, Balanced, and Maximum — and conserves up to 80% of memory used in suspended tabs. Users can exempt certain sites from being suspended if they need those pages to remain active. For users who wish to manually manage resources, the browser’s task manager (available via Shift+Esc) displays memory and CPU consumption per tab.

Chrome runs each tab in its own process, which means a single misbehaving tab can’t take down the entire browser. The tradeoff is that Chrome consumes more memory than single-process browsers — a criticism that has followed it for years. Memory Saver takes care of this, but it’s a mitigation to the underlying architecture, not a solution.

EXTENSIONS

The Chrome Web Store has more than 110,000 extensions. Because Chrome is built on Chromium and most of its competitors — Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi — are built on Chromium, extensions written for Chrome will usually work on those browsers, too. Chrome is effectively setting the extension standard for the industry.

In June 2025, Google removed Manifest V2 extensions from the Chrome Web Store, completing a migration to Manifest V3 that it had been pushing since 2022. Manifest V3 changes the way extensions can interact with web requests, which limits what some ad blockers and content filters can do. Google says the change is for better security and performance. Critics, such as Mozilla and a number of independent security researchers, said it undermines ad blocking. Other Chromium-based browsers responded differently: Microsoft kept some MV2 extensions in the Edge store and Brave made a separate download section for popular MV2 ad blockers including uBlock Origin.

SECURITY AND SAFETY

Safe Browsing scans URLs against Google’s database of known phishing sites, malware, and dangerous downloads and warns users before a page loads. The default Standard protection executes these checks while sending URLs through privacy servers so that exact browsing history is not exposed to Google. Enhanced Protection, opt-in, sends more data to Google in return for faster and more accurate threat detection, real-time checks against previously unknown attacks and deeper scans of downloaded files.

The Password Manager creates, stores and auto-fills credentials associated with a Google account. It compares saved passwords to known breach databases and identifies weak or reused passwords. An in-development Automated Password Change feature, discovered in Chrome Canary builds in early 2025, would enable Gemini to automatically change a compromised password on supported sites instead of just alerting the user.

Google Lens is integrated into Chrome through right-clicking on any image. It identifies objects, translates text in images, finds visually similar products, and searches for information about whatever is in the image — all without leaving the browser.

PLATFORMS

Chrome is available on Windows 10 and Windows 11 (x64, Arm64). Support for macOS 10.15 Catalina was dropped with Chrome 129 in September 2024; support for macOS 11 was dropped with Chrome 139 in August 2025. Chrome is available on Linux distributions using standard package managers. On Android, it is the default browser. On iOS it uses Apple’s required WebKit engine instead of Blink.

ChromeOS, Google’s lightweight desktop operating system, which is shipped on Chromebook hardware, uses Chrome as its core application. Google designed ChromeOS with the assumption that most computing occurs in a browser and Chrome is the environment in which all ChromeOS apps run.