Tl;Dr It was a team effort. If you want one name, Ben Goodger was the lead and wrote the original design doc.

As Philip mentions, Chrome is based on many open source projects going back about a decade. Hundreds of engineers worked on those FOSS packages.

The Google story began around March 1, 2006 when someone came up with the idea for an April Fools joke that Google was making a browser. That unknown person probably deserves an honorable mention. because they spawned the more serious discussion at Google.

From there the Pm team discussed briefly whether this should be taken seriously. They decided it was a joke and too much of a distraction.

On March 27, the AFJ was announced to the company.

That immediately spawned a more serious discussion, primarily on the Google Ideas mailing list that we really should build a browser. I'm not sure who made the original Ideas list post, but I suppose they also deserve an honorable mention. At that point, several engineers, myself included, started lobbying for Google to actually make a browser. Ben Goodger pointed out that we had several engineers from Mozilla and Netscape. My own point was that Google was increasingly dependant on Javascript and other company's browser platforms. Other engineers pointed out that we also needed a better Javascript engine for search quality, since the Web itself was also increasingly based on Javascript.

It then went to Product Council, which came back positive around April 15. It was now an official Google project.

Ben was the main tech lead and wrote the design doc. (Ben also is who helped setup the Linux build for Chromebook.)

On the management side, Brian Racowski was the main point person for the project, and I'm sure he also did a significant amount of work to get the ball rolling on the project.

There are certainly many others who tackled major milestones, particularly the V8 Javascript engine, NaCl, and sandboxed Flash, but I can't remember all the names.

Because Chrome was based on open source, internal to Google we had prototype quality builds almost from day 1. June 2006 was the first time I saw rendered html.

More than 10,000 open source developers have contributed code to the Chromium project since September 1st 2008, when it was announced to the public.

Jeff's answer has some inaccuracies so I wanted to clarify.

The Chrome project was started by Linus Upson, who was the manager of Google's team of Firefox contributors at the time. The original multiprocess architecture of Chrome was implemented by Darin Fisher & others. The initial UI was designed by a group including Arnaud Weber, Glen Murphy, Brian Rakowski and myself and implemented by a larger team of engineers with Arnaud & I acting as leads. There are many other important components each with their own leads.

I wasn't too involved in the bringup of the Linux build other than being opinionated about porting layers and UI frameworks. As for ChromeOS, I contributed to the development of the new window manager (Ash/Aura) from 2011.

Building a browser is a huge effort that requires a lot of people with different skill sets. Somehow on Chrome we were consistently able to find the best people - it's certainly the best team I've ever been had the privilege to be a part of. I'm really glad to see so many of the original team are still active participants.

Of course there's a lot more to it than this but this is all I have to say for the time being.

Google Chrome

Chrome was assembled from 25 different code libraries from Google and third parties such as Mozilla's Netscape Portable Runtime, Network Security Services, NPAPI, Skia Graphics Engine, SQLite, and a number of other open-source projects.[40] The V8 JavaScriptvirtual machine was considered a sufficiently important project to be split off (as was Adobe/Mozilla's Tamarin) and handled by a separate team in Denmark coordinated by Lars Bak at Aarhus. According to Google, existing implementations were designed "for small programs, where the performance and interactivity of the system weren't that important", but web applications such as Gmail "are using the web browser to the fullest when it comes to DOM manipulations and JavaScript", and therefore would significantly benefit from a JavaScript engine that could work faster.

So, like a lot of projects based on open source, nailing down a "creator" is hard. Google only speaks of "The Chrome Team," as in the Google Chrome Comic Book.

Sundar Pichai (American business executive) and Linus Upson made the original announcement, A fresh take on the browser.

On the Chrome AMA on Reddit, three members of the team introduce themselves:

• Jeff Chang (jeffchang), product manager
• Glen Murphy (frenzon), user interface designer
• Peter Kasting (pkasting), software engineer

But these just seem to be team members, not creators.

Nailing down the "creators" is a tough call, especially since Chome is made up of so many parts. Success has many fathers, as they say.

Before chrome there were only browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape etc.

Although, google had monopoly in search for years but still before chrome they were dependent upon other browsers for search. For example, say a user has to search for an article on the internet , they have to go to internet explorer first and then they can google the desired article.

See, In this case, Google was dependent on Internet Explorer, which is Microsoft's business. If Microsoft had manipulated Internet Explorer and stopped making google as their default search engine then the Google’s business would have been tough.

So, keeping this thing in mind and to eliminate their dependency upon other browser, they made their own and more friendly/powerful browser.

Also, Google’s main business is data. Without a powerful browser like chrome they could not have got this much of data and also they could not have maintained such type of ecosystem on its products as it maintains now.

Definitely, Chrome has been one of Google’s major products.

There are a few reasons why Google Chrome is a successful browser.

1. Success of the company Google and it’s products. People may want to use it based on how awesome they think the Google search engine is, and also Google itself. People use their services everyday, from YouTube to Google+, Blogger to Google Earth.
2. Google advertises Chrome when users search on Google. If you look in the corner of your screen when searching with Google, it sometimes asks you to download Chrome for optimised performance. It also sometimes asks you, even when you have Chrome, to make Chrome your default browser, as well as ads in Gmail and YouTube.
3. Layout of Chrome. Google Chrome was a sleek, new layout that other browsers don’t have. The way the tabs are shaped to the smooth, oval search bar, it looks more convincing than other browsers. They all look old, and cramped, but Chrome is very different.
4. Google versus Microsoft. Generally speaking, the main competitors on the market are Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer and Google Chrome. Firefox and Internet Explorer (Microsoft’s first browser) are old, so though they have many numbers, it’s just because of how old they are. So that leaves us with Chrome and Edge. Unfortunately for Microsoft, they own the failed search engine Bing, which many people dislike because it’s relatively new compared to Google, and is boring and black.

So this is why Google is more popular. Edge pester you to use Bing, whilst Chrome only advises you to use Google. Therefore, Chrome’s sales rocket and Google become one step closer to becoming more used than Microsoft.

We had a 'pick a codename' vote early in the development cycle - the names that came out of that competition were so terrible that we were all pretty happy when one of the leads overrode it and declared that the codename would be 'Chrome', presumably because he likes fast cars. When it came time to pick a real name for the product before shipping, we ended up sticking with 'Chrome' because:

• During development, we'd all come to love the product deeply, and new names had a hard time breaking and bettering the associations we'd already formed with the codename.
• As our lead did, people associated it with speed - shiny fast engines and cars.
• In design terminology, 'chrome' refers to the non-webpage parts of the browser's interface - the toolbars, tabs and buttons - because our design philosophy was "Content, not chrome" - putting our focus on minimizing the amount of browser UI present, we felt it cheekily appropriate to name the browser 'Chrome'.

Also, I personally like it because of its relation to 'chroma' and 'chromatic' - I love the cacophony of colors that those words imply, and how that relates to the beautiful range of design across the web. Though from the looks I get when I explain this to my teammates, I'm pretty sure I'm the only one who views it this way.

Google Chrome is fast, relatively lightweight, supports extensions, supports close integration with the Google web application ecosystem (gmail, sheets, etc…), and displays content identically regardless of which operating system you’re on (including Windows, Mac, and Linux).

Chrome’s not open-source, but it draws it’s code from the Chromium Project, which is open-source, so it also benefits from the efforts of all those developers. It also provides great code reviewing tools to support those developers & designers.

It’s a great browser, and Google has promoted it heavily, so it’s no surprise that it’s caught on like wildfire. Additionally, there’s a “tipping point” effect, where once it becomes the market-dominant browser, developers & designers often switch to it because it’s what their visitors & customers will be using to view their websites & online products.

Speaking from personal perspective, that’s why I use Chrome: it’s what my desktop customers use, and I need to experience everything like they do.

Mobile browsing is another story: my mobile customers are almost exclusively on IOS, so I use Safari, not Chrome. I like Safari and it’s a solid mobile browser, but if the market changes and Chrome becomes the standard for IOS, then I’ll switch.

But in terms of desktop browsers, Chrome is my #1 browser of choice. It’s got the performance, stability & reliability to make it a truly great window to the internet, and in my book it’s light years ahead of Microsoft IE, Edge, or Mozilla Firefox.

I saw Marissa Mayer (business person) speak at a TechCrunch50 event a few years back when she still worked at Google (company). She was announcing the launch of Google Instant Preview (those annoying screenshots that display on hover in search results). Something she said shocked me and made perfect sense.

The faster the Internet is, the more money Google makes.

Think about it. Faster internet means more searches and more pageviews both of which mean more ad impressions/clicks. Speeding up the Internet even if just a tiny fraction of a second could mean millions of dollars for Google. Billions over time.

Google Chrome is one way they're speeding up the Internet, but there is also Google Fiber, Google PageSpeed and many more initiatives which I'm sure they take very seriously.

The point of making a new Chrome-based browser is that even though it uses the same site rendering engine as Chrome does, it also does other things that are useful to the company that develops it. For example, it may send statistics about the sites that the users visit to the company, or it may censor certain sites, or it may show advertising for that company’s partners, or it may be set to use only a particular search engine, or it may simply carry the developing company’s branding. I’m not saying that the Baidu browser, or any other, actually does these things; these are just examples.

The more important question is What’s the point of using such a browser. If these features are useful to you, then use that browser. If not, just ignore it and use whatever browser that you like.

yes, sure.

Some extension connect their CRM system to famous mail service like Gmail/outlook, letting user access and control the data from mail. There for extension is a very important part in their product.

Chrome web store also let developers sell their app/extension like in App Store/ Google play.

Also, there are some users want to customize their daily webapp/website to improve the productivity, but they can not control the webapp/website, so Chrome extension is the best choice for them, It’s easy and almost can do anything on the client computer.

As a chrome extension developer, I also make money with my extension and also by creating extensions for my clients from all over the world.

Since there are also many users using other browser like Firefox and Safari, If you want to make money with browser extension, you’d better to know how to create extension/addon/plugin for these browsers.

like me:)

I can confirm there is in fact a project entry listed in the PDB called Google OS. The project entry was created by Mike Jazayer, Director of Chrome, in 2007. If anyone has questions about the project, they should be talking to Mike not asking the general public.

Google primarily makes money by showing ads in Google search results.The more people that search on Google, the more money they make.

Firefox has a Google search toolbar.Google pays Firefox a royalty for every search made through that toolbar.More people the use Chrome,less the money Google loses.

Internet Explorer by default uses Bing search engine. Google can't make any money off these people. So making a better browser with Google search as default helps.

There are also other ways that Google makes money from Chrome. When users sign into Chrome, Google are better able to collect more personal details, which results in more personalised ads, which are more likey to be clicked.

Right now there are a few visually rough edges in the product - if you were to identify them and file a bug on http://crbug.com/ that would be a great help (many things are already filed). If you were to create and attach a mock of what the affected area *should* look like, that would be even better.

If you CC me (glen at chromium.org), I can hopefully get you a response faster. I can't promise that we'll take your suggestions - internally we reject the overwhelming majority of mocks produced by designers (including myself), and they go through long processes of iteration, consternation, and review, but such help is always appreciated.

We're also always super excited to see proposals for any visual improvement - for example, your take on what any part of the browser should look like, but the rejection rates for that are much higher, so it may not be as rewarding for you (though you could always take your work and make it a theme, which would be awesome).

When it first came out, it was clearly the best browser choice. This isn’t as clear today, but no other browser is clearly better, so we stick to what we have.

When Chrome first became available, the other browser choices were bad:

[Source]

• Internet Explorer was horribly slow and bad at following standards
• Firefox was slow and ugly
• The third choice was Opera. It was decent, but slow and cost money.

Chrome entered that market, offering:

• Speed: Google Chrome Speed Tests - Chrome Browser vs. Potato
• Standard-compliance
• Security (or at least, advertising security)
• Smooth, out-of-the-way user interface
• Good extensions API and store
• Good developer tools
• The Google brand

Since then, the browser market changed:

• Internet Explorer was replace by Edge, which all reports say is totally good
• Firefox is at least as fast as Chrome now
• Opera is free
• All browsers have converged to the same UI and devtools
• Standards are better
• Mac OS became popular, with Safari being the bundled browser
• Web users have switched to mobile phones, where installing a browser is not worth the effort

Today, the differentiating features of Chrome are:

• It’s integrated with your Google account, for keeping your sessions in sync.
  All browsers have such a feature, but Chrome is using the Google account.
• It’s bundled with Android

and that’s about it… but the differentiating features of other browsers are not better.

So, most people either use what’s bundled with their system (Edge, Safari, Chrome mobile) or install what they’re used to (Chrome) because all the bookmarks and extensions are already in the right place.

Let me put it this way.

Thousands of open source developers contributed to Linux, just to name a few: Dennis Ritchie, Linus Torvalds, Barry Kauler, and Richard Stallman.

Thousands of Google employees contributed to the Google Apps that run on Chromebook. The Google Docs and Gmail teams in particular were key. Without their work and the acquisition of Writely, it would not have been possible to build a fully-functional operating system on top of web apps in 2006.

The Chrome team wrote an excellent browser, built the Unix port, and gave me direct assistance in compiling it. Brian Rakowski (links to: /Brian-Rakowski) was particularly instrumental in facilitating my access to the Chrome team's resources.

Mike Jazayeri joined the project sometime around May 2007. He did the work on the PM side, selling the project to Larry Page and other Google executives, as well as setting up key meetings with the hardware partners. Aside from myself, no one worked harder to launch the project..

Jeff Huber was maybe the most key executive. He made the project official and funded the project with head count for the first time in 2007. [Prior to that, it was a "0% project" which had no allocation at all.] He also provided great feedback on the overall design.

Larry Page also provided excellent feedback. In particular, one of Larry's top priorities was boot time. If not for that, I would not have prioritized that as a feature, because I personally was much more focused on overall speed - not boot speed. Key features like parallel boot initialization and the near instant boot of Chromebook came directly out of that feedback.

Hundreds of other Google engineers provided testing and feedback for the operating system.

I brought the work of all these thousands of people together as a browser-centric operating system, now called a "webtop".

In the end, I spent about a year and a half, writing about a hundred revisions of the operating systems - only 5 of which were published company-wide at Google. I think there were 3 patents written on different pieces of core technology, it looks like Google only filed 2 of those patents. For some reason, they waited until 2009 to file the patents even though the bulk of the work was done in 2006 and 2007.

Overall, it was a great experience, particularly working with and presenting to some of the top people in the software industry, like Larry Page, Jeff Huber, and Brian Rakowski, on such an exciting project.

PS. I'm working on a book about the whole experience and the years since. Stay tuned.

Sundar Pichai is the founder of Chrome & is widely known as CEO of Google & Alphabet Inc., but he is not the founder of Chrome browser. Chrome was developed by a team of engineers at Google led by Jeff Nelson, & implemented by developers such as Ben Goodger.

As for the dates, the project was first announced April 2006.

Windows executables started to be passed around in November 2006 for testing purposes.

The first major internal release was January 1, 2007. At that point, every Google engineer had a copy. The next 20 months were spent on testing and bug fixing. We had to test not just the browser, but Google's various browser extensions and web properties, so it was an enormous testing effort.

In total, that's exactly 29 months plus or minus a few days in development before it was publicly announced.

A more accurate measure might be in terms of man-months, but that's also more difficult to answer due to the changing size of the team over the development period and the involvement of many people not on the Chrome team.

I believe it has to do with following :

1. Monetization. A major portion of Google's revenue comes from search and advertising. If you have Chrome as your main browser, you skip an extra step to get to Google's search page. In addition, as more users adopt Chrome as their main browser (phone, pc), it should greatly increase the usage of search and thus, should greatly increase revenue.

2) Data. As a corollary to the above, capturing more search queries and browsing history will greatly increase Google's data on end users. More data will allow Google to do more "predictive analytics" to tailor their search results and services.

3) Integration. Chome allows Google to integrate all their services and applications onto this one platform. By integrating all of these services and applications, people will spend more time on Chrome = more usage, data, and revenue.

4) Customer Experience - Google has optimized Chrome for the the above, and has made it blazing fast. Having a fast, seamless, integrated, and personalized (via your login account) experience makes a customer's life a lot easier and will make them more likely to use Google more often.

Like all Google services, it relies on ads. As you are aware back in 2004 IE and Firefox were the occupy 80–95 % of the Internet and Google used to pay 80–90 million dollars to be the default search engine in these browsers.

As most people never change their default search engine ir default browser settings. This would allow Google to show you ads based in your search queries

The reason chrome was created was because someday Microsoft or Mozilla could boot its search engine (Like bing or Yahoo) in favor of Google, thereby causing loss of billions of dollars to Google.

Chrome was built on the moto of Speed, Simplicity and Security. Not only that with Chrome a whole new Architecture was created ( Multi-process) This allowed your browser to continue running, even if other tabs crash

The model of Multi-Process is being adapted by Safari and Firefox

Even today it pays billions of dollars to be default search engine in Safari in IOS.

All this may sound evil to you, but everything has a cost associated with it. A company needs to make money to sustain itself and feed its employees and investors

There are many reasons. I'll enumerate the most usual:

1. Security. If you browse anything, make downloads, access anything in Chrome, use Firefox for banking and private mail.
2. Speed. In time, Chrome size of cache, pictures and history can become morbidly obese and make everything crawl. Using another browser with 16 MB cache instead of 16 GB will make internal database of cookies and pqge elements *much* more happy.
3. VPN and proxy. Advanced VPN clients can be directed to be used by one application but not another. Also, Chrome cannot set a proxy but rather use the system (read: IE) proxy. Firefox can use a proxy by itself, so one can access streaming content, shop as if is in another country (so availability and discounts differs greatly).
4. Gaming and legacy. Some games (especially Flash, which will be obsoleted this year), legacy websites and applications can behave badly in Chrome but still work in others such as IE.

Peter Kasting, a founding member of the Chrome team (which you can verify yourself by looking at his history of code contributions and posts on the official Google Chrome blog) has said this:

So, given all that: Yes, Jeff, I dispute that you wrote anything called Google OS, or that it was "substantially identical to Chromebook" (which is a meaningless comparison; a Chromebook is a piece of hardware. Perhaps you meant Chrome OS, in which case, I still dispute any similarity). I do not dispute that you wrote an email to the company (since I quoted from that email above). Also, Chrome OS was never internally called "Google OS" (I don't feel at liberty to reveal the original codename, but that wasn't it), and I quite literally watched that project be conceived and staffed from a starting ground of zero; whatever project you got staffed didn't morph into it. Given that (a) your statements of fact contradict things I personally know to be true, (such as claiming that Chrome could have been run on Linux in 2007, which is flatly impossible); (b) multiple Chrome engineers have commented both here and internally disputing your characterizations of your project as having been the genesis for Chrome OS; and (c) I have yet to see a single supporting comment from any source, Googler or non; I am left with only the following, if you want common ground:

* I am convinced you worked on a RAM-based, stripped-down version of Linux, which reached at least the public announcement stage.
* I am convinced that you applied for and eventually received a patent on this idea.
* I'm prepared to believe that you discussed the idea with various levels of management at Google, perhaps even gaining support for a staffed project.

That's as far as I am willing to go. Sorry.

-- Some people today are linking to Xoogler Jeff Nelson's post…

In contrast, nobody named Jeff Nelson has ever contributed code to the Chrome OS project.

See also: User's answer to Does Jeff Nelson get a sense of accomplishment when he sees so many people using Chrome OS?.

Google Chrome is a cross-platform web application that runs in the Chrome web browser developed by Google. It’s relatively new competes with major browsers like Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox. The Crome main component is OS where serves as the platform for web apps. Let your users Google Chrome in CSS, HTML5, JavaScript to transport an experience comparable to a local application. Additional Chrome continues support extensions on all kinds of platforms

It’s the package with all of Google’s internet stuff and the Chromebook. Not really vital as all the big good browsers can do what Chrome browser does. At least for me. I sort of think that the Chrome browser works a little more smoothly with my google web site apps and storage, with my Chromebook and the Chrome browser on Windows. Mac noticed me that my Mac Chrome browser would soon start giving me troubles. Sure enough, it did. I talked to fellow Mac Lovers and they said it was Google’s fauilt. Well, I uninstalled Chrome from my Mac only and doing just fine with Safari.

I only use the “main” Google web site apps —like Drive/Docs, Simple Calendar, Gmail, and Keep the note taker. When using my Mac or Dell Alienware I have no trouble accessing the Google web apps. If I put something on the Mac or Windows hard drive I can’t access it with either of the other platforms. Like say using sweetie Notational Velocity with the Mac. But in this, I can perfectly well use something like Dropbox for all my all my keeper docs, pics, and videos.

Did you smile today? Not yet? No problem, here I’ll list a five chrome extensions that will bring smile on your face, and even on your friend’s face.

#1 Troll Your Friends

Manage to install this extension in your friend’s machine and it gives full control over what jokes to show at what time. Some of the possible things that can happen is showing a notification of successful payment, texts flying, background changing and lot more.

#2 Jailbreak the patriarchy

This again can be installed on your friend’s machine and once this extension is in action your friend will see the genders swapped on any page he/she sees. For example, if your friends sees a page where it’s written “He went to the super market with his mother” that will now be swapped to “She went to the super market with her father” sounds creepy when your friend reads something about himself/herself in emails, doesn’t it?

#3 Nothing

As the name suggests, this extension does nothing. Trust me, this extension does nothing and still it has managed to have 6k plus users. No crash, zero space consumption. Post installation, the icon “N” will be visible and clicking on which will result in navigating to the Nothing extension page on chrome web store. So it does something, contradicts it’s name.

#4 website Destroyer

Stress out your hatred for a webpage by hammering it and destroying it. This extension has weapons like hammer, grenade, knives, axes etc. My favourite is machine gun, I target each work, character or symbols. This extension has an alternate, DrangonBall website destroyer so if you are DragonBall Z fan, go for this.

#5 Kick Ass

The best one arrives at the last, here you have a spaceship that helps you destroy each element on a webpage. Use the space bar to shoot and arrow keys to target and place. You also have an option to destroy every thing in one go by planting a bomb on a webpage. Hate the weekend work mail from your manager? Plant a bomb on that page and release some stress against this with Kick Ass.

Bonus Bonus Bonus

Play while you’re not connected to the internet. Try accessing any webpage and you’ll find t-rex waiting for your command to run.

Over to you, which extension are you going to use first? Are you aware of any other funnier extension? Let me know in the comment section below.

Till then share this in your network and take a chill pill.

1. Search in the address bar - Unlike other browsers that have two bars - address bar and search bar, Google chrome has just one bar for both purposes. Moreover, it also gives your search suggestions right there.
2. Clean interface - The interface is ineed clean without any mess to jump on to get where you want to.
3. Addons & Extensions - While chrome has fewer of these compared to Firefox, it still is pretty convenient and useful.
4. Incognito Mode - If you do not want to worry about cleaning browser history, download hitory, and cookies, icognito mode is the perfect mode to browse since it clears all of these off once you close the browser.
5. Task Manager - View the resource (CPU, memory, cache, process id et al) allocation for every tab. Moreover, it lets you End process for any tab that’s giving you an issue or is unresponsive.
6. Developer’s console - Can speak about this for hours. However, to be concise:
   Rapid Debugging - Shows errors in the console and navigates you to the problematic code upon click. You can even set debug pointers in the JavaScript files located in the Sources tab.
   
   On-the-fly style changes - You can see the result of your code by making changes directly in the browser. You can edit the DOM elements and change CSS code for testing.
   
   Network monitoring - The network panel records information about each network operation on a page, including detailed timing data, HTTP request and response headers, cookies, and more.
7. Security - It employs Sandboxing method which blocks malware and isolates every tab from spreading any problem. Since every tab has it’s own process id, it can be killed with the task manager.
8. Help and Support - The forum lets you submit the issues you face and also helps you keep aware of the known issues in the product.

Q: Which is better, Google Chrome or the Google app?

Google Chrome (assuming you mean the browser and not the operating system on a Chromebook).

Chrome is a full browser. You can go to any URL directly from it. It can also cast a tab or the whole screen to a Chromecast device in certain versions. The browser does not support casting in the versions for certain operating systems.

The browser is cross platform and certainly works on Windows, Android and probably several other operating systems.

The Google App is more specific in that it allows you to perform Google searches. As a result of those searches, the App may take you into a browser to get the full results.

I don’t believe the App allows you to bypass the question stage so whatever you want to look at has to start out with Google.

Everyone seems to be touching on volume and not quality of user information. I used to work at a very large ad network and the single most valuable thing we had was knowing who we were advertising to!

Yes, if you have more searches it's more ads you can serve, but this becomes exponentially more valuable when you know that this person is female, 20-25, likes soccer, works in finance, lives in Chicago, etc. Google can infer all of this from your Youtube history, your search history, your browsing history, your Android phone's apps, and even your thermostat (see Nest) activities. And not just that, but because you log into all of these things with your Google account, Google knows who you are across all devices!

Chrome on your laptop? They know it's you. Chrome on your mom's desktop? They know it's you. Chrome on your phone? They know it's you. And by extension, they can charge advertisers more money because they know what ad YOU need to see at this very minute.

So Greg touched on part of this but it's not just about volume and speed, it's about their ability to track you across the entire spectrum of activity. As the internet grows, Google is becoming larger AND more accurate at picking you out of the billions of users out there. It's kind of creepy to think about, but Google knows where you live, what you eat, where you work, what you're wearing, where you bought it, and how much money you have left in your bank account.

We get free browsers, operating systems, email, maps, etc all so they can make a killing on ads. Some people are freaked out by that. Me? I love having all this free stuff.

There is nothing technically wrong with it. It is a great browser. It is fast, secure and feature rich. The only problem with it is that it is becoming the ONLY browser that anyone uses. This puts it in the same position that IE was once in and we all know how that turned out.

One company now owns the rendering core that powers the entire Internet. Guess whose services will render most smoothly. If Google wants to get rid of competitors, they can simply optimize chrome so that it runs their services poorly.

Sure, you can use another browser - like Opera (with Chrome's rendering core developed by Google), Vivaldi (with Chrome's rendering core developed by Google) or newly even Microsoft Edge (Also with Chrome's rendering core developed by Google).

The only choice s that are not Google Chrome are Firefox and Safari. And that's why I prefer Firefox, which is just as good technically as Chrome, and provides some nice fair competition for Google to keep the web balanced.

In the simplest sense, Google Chrome is a web browser, a piece of computer software that you use to access the World Wide Web. It shares the web browser category with software such as Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Apple Safari, Opera, Vivaldi, Konqueror and many others.

In another sense, it is the commercial version of the Chromium open source project, started by Google but now participated in by lots of people both for fun and working for many different companies. It uses a rendering engine (to draw pixels to the screen to represent the HTML document you're viewing) called Blink that is an approximately two-year-old fork of WebKit, which was started by Apple, and which at some point started its life as a fork of the open source project Konqueror's KHTML rendering engine, which itself started way back in 1998 as a fork of something else. In addition, it uses dozens of open source libraries for a great number of things, for example working with various file formats such as JPEG images, ZIP files, PNGs, etc.

In this latter sense, then, Google Chrome (along with most other modern browsers) is the culmination of the work and play of thousands of people in a multitude of open source projects stretching back 20 years or so, plus another 20 if you count all of the work, much of it open source or at least open specification and design, that went into the underpinnings of the Internet.

The best browser is a moving target. All of the major browsers are rapidly evolving so the best browser varies from time to time as the new versions, enhancements, and bug fixes are released. The best browser also depends on the type of device (desktop, tablet, phone) and operating system (Windows, OSX, iOS, Android, Winphone, BB10).

For a desktop PC running Windows 8.1 update 1 or 2, I would personally rank the four browsers as follows:

A. Right now (September 2014)
1. Firefox 30.0.1 -- fast, stable, and allows split screen (see picture below)
2. Internet Explorer 11 (latest updated version)
3. Google Chrome 34.0.18
4. Opera (latest version)

B. A few months ago, before the new Firefox version and IE11 enhancements were released, I ranked them like this.
1. Google Chrome
2. Internet Explorer 11
3. Firefox
4. Opera

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Firefox 30.0.1

Note the split screen with Twitter inside the small window on the left and Quora inside the larger window on the right. The size of the windows are also adjustable. This is really a nice feature if you are using a large widescreen monitor (27"-40").