By: Raymond Hackney
When Google announced the
release of its own web browser Chrome in 2008, many people asked
themselves why Google was building a web browser. In retrospect, the
better question would have been, why Google hadn't built a web browser
earlier. After all, the company's entire business is people using a
browser to access Google's services, as Sundar Pichai, a senior vice
president at Google, put it.
As a matter of fact, the plan to
make a Google web browser had existed for years, Google's CEO Eric
Schmidt just hadn't considered his company ready to enter the resource
drenching browser wars. By 2008, Google made billions of dollars a year
and had finally matured enough to go head to head with Microsoft and
it's market dominating internet explorer.
In September 2008, the
first official release of Chrome was published and the open-source
browser began its steady climb through the ranks. By the third quarter
of 2009, Chrome had caught up with Apple's Safari and set its sights on
the next contender: Firefox. It took a bit longer to catch up with
Firefox, but in the fourth quarter of 2011, Chrome's share of global web
browsing surpassed that of Firefox. Less than a year later, Chrome
became the world's number one browser, overtaking Microsoft's Internet
Explorer which had utterly dominated the market just five years earlier.
Remarkably,
Chrome's ascend came almost entirely at the expense of Microsoft's
browser. Since the third quarter of 2008, the Internet Explorer's market
share dropped from 68 to 25 percent, while Chrome's soared from zero to
43 percent. Internet users around the world have come to like the speed
and functionality of Google's browser, as opposed to the Internet
Explorer which is often described as slow and bloated.
You will find more statistics at Statista
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