Google Chrome’s biggest challenge at age 10 might just be its own success
Exactly 10 years ago Tuesday, a newly promoted vice president named Sundar Pichai stood before a group of tech reporters in a conference room at Google's Mountain View, California, headquarters. There, he revealed the Chrome web browser publicly for the first time.
Over the last decade, the comparatively sleek browser eclipsed rivals and now accounts for 60 percent of browser usage, according to analytics firm StatCounter. There are 2 billion copies of Chrome installed, with 1 billion people using it each month. And Pichai, buoyed by a product he's called "exceptionally profitable," is now Google's chief executive.
"The initial beta launch showed we struck a chord," said Darin Fisher, the Chrome engineering leader who helped write the first secret prototype in 2006. "We were hoping to show Chrome wasn't just a me-too browser," he said in an exclusive interview for the browser's 10th anniversary.
Along the way, Chrome led an industry effort to modernize the web -- an effort that also let Google advance its own services like YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps and the G Suite productivity tools. Now, though, Chrome faces a new question: what to do with all that power.
The web is famously open, a neutral computing foundation controlled by no one single entity. But as Chrome gets more powerful, the open web could gradually become the Google web.
"Having a war of ideas and technology and engines is healthy for the web," said Brad Frost, a web developer, author and consultant. Instead, he said, "you're starting to see a lot of sites -- including, scarily, Google-owned sites -- that only work in Chrome, which absolutely goes against the fabric of the web."
Watch this: How Chrome changed web browsers 10 years ago
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We've seen this problem before, when nearly 20 years ago Microsoft's Internet Explorer squeezed out Netscape Navigator and other would-be rivals to dominate the web. It took years to wean the web from its reliance on the increasingly outdated, slow and insecure Internet Explorer 6 introduced in 2001.
This time things are different, though: Where Microsoft let IE languish after its victory, stalling web progress for years, Google's Chrome team continues to invest aggressively. And because it's mostly open-source, anyone can use the software for their own purposes -- and indeed, Microsoft, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, Samsung, Baidu and Yandex have built their browsers on Chrome's innards. And even if Chrome dominates, Google generally sticks to open-web principles and has collaborated with rivals.
People initially laughed at Chrome, recounted Rahul Roy-Chowdhury, the Chrome team leader who joined the project shortly after in 2009. But Google stuck to its mission. "It was designed for complex, rich web applications -- the direction where computing was going," he said.
Nobody's laughing now. That's where the computing still is headed today, and Chrome is towing the rest of us along.
Google took another step into the future Tuesday, releasing a new version of Chrome with an overhauled user interface. The tabs are still on top, but many elements get a new round-corner look, the address bar can give direct answers in the drop-down that appears below your search query, and a new password manager feature can generate and store passwords so you don't end up recycling old ones.