How Google Chrome has Changed over the Past 10 Years

On September 1, 2018, Google Chrome celebrated its 10 years anniversary and it transformed the way people used to surf the Internet. Since its launch on September 1, 2008, the browser has undergone a lot of updates and upgrades and grew from a market share of 0.3 percent in the year of its launch to nearly 60 percent in the ten years.

Google Chrome was initially rolled out as a Windows-only beta app and afterward, in 2009, it was extended to support macOS and Linux.

After its introduction, the browser gained popularity as it was way much faster and more efficient than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Even though Apple’s Safari and the free and open-source Mozilla Firefox browsers existed during that time, the Google Chrome browser grew in popularity because of some of its interesting features.

Let’s take a look at some of the features of Google Chrome:

Speed

Remember when was the last time you were exasperated by the snail-paced speed of the browser while surfing the internet?

The answer to that is when you’re not using the Google Chrome browser … or the internet connection is really slow!

Google Chrome was not just fast it was extremely fast courtesy to some very smart coding. As per the Google, the browser’s V8 JavaScript engine could process JavaScript 10 times faster Firefox or Safari and nearly 56 times faster than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7. This kind of speed led for faster and more efficient in-browser apps.

Omnibox

The Google Chrome browser was launched with an Omnibox that merges both search fields and location to provide early results and some extremely relevant suggestions. The Omnibox API enables users to register a keyword with the browser’s address bar. The Omnibox provides suggestions for searches, top pages you’ve visited before, popular pages you haven’t visited, and many more.

Each tab has its own process

For the Google Chrome browser, every new tab has a new process. Mozilla Firefox has just one process for all the tabs opened in the browser.

The tab opened in the Google Chrome browser has its own separate process meaning that in case a website had some bunk code, the browser would crash that one tab and leave the other opened tabs functioning normally. This resulted in a much lesser complete browser resets.

Incognito mode

Google Chrome browser comes with an incognito browsing mode that helps users to surf the Internet and browse the web privately. The incognito browsing mode can be used to log into the personal mail ids and social media platforms in a public computer so that the browser does not save or show the email account used while logging in. The incognito mode can also be used to get around the paywalls of news organizations as well as check out profiles and websites through the eyes of an anonymous third-party.

Making the Internet less irritating

Earlier, it was so irritating when auto-play videos used to play automatically with all the loud sounds for a good minute before you could figure out the tab that was playing the video and pause or stop it from playing any further.

Google Chrome browser made it possible for users to mute the videos by default.

To rein in the irritating banner and pop-up ads and malicious redirects from websites, Google gave 30 days to websites asking them to abide by a set of web standards. In case they failed to do so, Chrome started blocking the ads and redirecting to malicious websites automatically.

The Google Chrome also became the first browser to become an operating system – the Chrome OS. The Chrome OS operates Chromebooks that, as of the fourth quarter of 2017, comprised nearly 60 percent of all of the mobile devices delivered to K-12 schools in the US.

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