Browser Options

Announcement

The release announcement was originally scheduled for 3 September 2008, and a comic by Scott McCloud was to be sent to journalists and bloggers explaining the features of and motivations for the new browser.[6] Copies intended for Europe were shipped early and German blogger Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped[7] made a scanned copy of the 38-page comic available on his website after receiving it on 1 September 2008.[8] Google subsequently made the comic available on Google Books and their site[9] and mentioned it on its official blog along with an explanation for the early release.[10]

The browser was first publicly released for Microsoft Windows (XP and later only) on 2 September 2008 in 43 languages, officially a beta version.[11] Chrome quickly gained about 1% market share. Mac OS X and Linux versions are under development.[12][13][14][15] In the end of 2008, a message saying that a "test shell" is available to build on Linux was placed in the Chromium project's developer wiki.[16] Some have tried this shell, which apparently lacked many features, but appeared to function quite well in rendering web sites (including JavaScript).[17][18] In March 2009, it was possible to build a pre-alpha version of the Chromium browser, which looked similar to the Windows release, but was still very far from complete.[19] On 9 January 2009, CNET reported that Google planned to release versions for Mac OS X and Linux by the first half of the year.[20] Versions of Mac OS X and Linux Google Chrome, based on Chromium, were released to the development channel for Google Chrome on 4 June 2009.[21]

The JavaScript virtual 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. Ten days after the Chrome launch a new JavaScript engine, SquirrelFish Extreme, was announced by the WebKit team, making the performance difference between WebKit and Chromium a dead heat again.[22]

On 2 September 2008, a CNET news item[23] drew attention to a passage in the terms of service for the initial beta release, which seemed to grant to Google a license to all content transferred via the Chrome browser. The passage in question was inherited from the general Google terms of service.[24] On the same day, Google responded to this criticism by stating that the language used was borrowed from other products, and removed the passage in question from the Terms of Service.[25] Google noted that this change would "apply retroactively to all users who have downloaded Google Chrome."[26] There was subsequent concern and confusion about whether and what information the program communicates back to Google. The company stated that usage metrics are only sent when users opt in by checking the option "help make Google Chrome better by automatically sending usage statistics and crash reports to Google" when the browser is installed.[dead link][27][28]

The first release of Google Chrome passed the Acid1 test but on Acid2 a very small artifact appears.[29] It also passed 79 out of the 100 subtests of the Acid3, higher than contemporary versions of both Internet Explorer 7, which scored 14, and Firefox 3, which scored 71, but lower than Opera, which scored 83.[30] When compared with contemporary development builds of Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari, Chrome scored lower than Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 (85), Opera (100), and Safari 4 (Developer Preview) (100),[30] but still higher than Internet Explorer (21).[citation needed] However, the current stable version (2.0) scores 100 out of 100 while still failing the link test.

By December 2008, Chrome had a 1.09% share of the web browser market.[31] As of 1 June 2009 (2009 -06-01)[update], market share of Google Chrome had grown to 1.80% in worldwide browser usage.[32]

The first official Chrome Mac OS X and Linux developer previews[33] were announced on 4 June 2009 with a blog post[34] saying they were missing many features and were intended for early feedback rather than general use.

On 7 July 2009, Google announced plans for a Google Chrome OS based on the Chrome browser and Linux.[

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