The History & Evolution Of The World’s Most Used Web Browser

Ah, the humble internet browser. So crucial to our experience of the internet, yet so easy to take for granted. Let’s be real, how many of us really think about our choice of web browser these days? If you don’t settle for the default browser provided by your operating system, then the first thing you likely do when setting up a new device is to download Google Chrome. It’s fast, it’s free, and it’s convenient — what’s not to like?

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Still, Google’s ubiquitous internet browser wasn’t always the dominant force it is now. Sure, its popularity may make it seem like the browser was always a fixture of the internet, but that’s far from the truth. It may seem impossible to imagine in a world where the majority of internet users opt for Chrome, but there was a time when Internet Explorer (IE) ruled the roost. Chrome, on the other hand, was the new kid on the block, trying to catch up to the big names and offer users something different.

From its early days to its ascendancy and culminating in its market dominance today, Chrome has taken quite a journey to reach its current stature. If you’ve ever wondered how things got the way they are today, then this look back at the birth, growth, and evolution of Google Chrome is for you.

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In the years immediately preceding Google Chrome, there was really only one name in town — Internet Explorer. Microsoft’s browser had seen off the once dominant Netscape Navigator during the first browser war, its victory allowing it to amass an astounding 95% of the browser market share in 2004. Such was Microsoft’s dominance that it became the de facto internet browser for web development, kicking off an age of IE-focused web development and, in Ars Technica’s words, “further perpetuating Microsoft’s ecosystem lock-in.”

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Thankfully, Microsoft’s utter dominance of the browser world was somewhat short-lived. Mozilla’s Firefox launched in November 2004 and would slowly eat away at Internet Explorer’s market share. While Firefox certainly helped push internet browsers forward — it popularized features like an integrated pop-up blocker and tabbed browsing — it never quite managed to break through Microsoft’s dominance. Firefox’s pre-Chrome market share peaked at 32% in August 2008, which, while not insignificant, still left Microsoft with the majority of the browser market.

Opera and Apple’s Safari were also around, but neither was all that popular, with a combined share of well below 10% of the browser market during this period. The mid-late 2000s browser market, then, was a two-horse race between Internet Explorer and the up-and-coming Firefox. However, that would soon change when a third name entered the picture.

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Google threw its hat into the browser ring in September 2008, launching the Google Chrome beta alongside a charming and very informational web comic that explained the thinking behind the new browser, which included an extension-friendly architecture that many of us now couldn’t live without. Google also released Chromium alongside it, which was and continues to be the open-source codebase for Chrome sans Google-specific integrations.

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In an announcement on the Official Google Blog, the corporation pitched its new offering as a “fresh take on the browser.” It included new features like sandboxed tabs — which prevented tabs from crashing each other — alongside improvements such as the V8 JavaScript engine, which offered better performance. Chrome also introduced UI and UX elements that have now become standard on all browsers — partly because a few of its rivals have now moved to the same codebase — such as having tabs on top of the dual-purpose address bar, detachable tabs, and a home page that showed thumbnail views of the most recently-visited pages.

It wasn’t just the novelty of these features that appealed to the tech press at the time. Google packaged all this in a delightfully minimalist design that stood out from the crowd, especially compared to the fussy UIs of Firefox 3.0 and Internet Explorer 7. Contemporary reviews loved the Chrome beta, with The Tech Herald calling it “a nice break from tradition.” TechCrunch went even further in its praise, calling it a “superb” package that “understands what you really want to do with a browser.”

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Google’s browser development team worked at a furious pace over the rest of 2008, adding missing features — such as a bookmark manager, which came to the beta in November — before exiting beta and launching the 1.0 version in mid-December that same year.

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Moving quickly to bring feature parity to Chrome and launch a stable version proved to be something of a masterstroke: Chrome’s browser share climbed steadily over its first full year as a stable release, culminating in an impressive 5.38% by the end of 2009, Chrome’s ascendance came almost singularly at the cost of Internet Explorer, too. While Firefox and other browsers retained their market share (or grew slightly), Microsoft’s once-dominant browser had dropped to 55% of the market by the end of 2009, a loss of nearly 10% from the start of the year.

Gaining 5% of the market was no mean feat for a fresh browser. Even Safari, Apple’s default browser, only accounted for less than 3% of traffic in 2009. Google was just getting started, too — the team announced Mac and Linux versions of the browser in early December 2009, paving the way for gaining an even bigger chunk of the browser market.

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Google also launched Chrome OS in 2009, extending Chrome’s back-to-basics, web-first design philosophy into a whole operating system. The corporation designed the OS primarily for use with a new style of laptop called Chromebooks, although the corporation has launched variants of the OS designed to run on standard laptops as an alternative to Windows.

Chrome was in the ascendancy. Now freshly cross-platform, the presence of a new kid on the browser block prompted contemporary journalists to float the prospect of a new browser war, now a three-cornered fight between Microsoft, Mozilla, and Google — with Opera and Apple also in the mix.

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To Microsoft’s credit, it wasn’t taking Google’s threat lying down. Internet Explorer 8, released in 2009, introduced some notable updates and new features. Microsoft improved IE’s JavaScript handler, resulting in better performance when rendering websites. IE 8 also complied better with the then-prevalent web standards, bringing it in line with its rivals. Microsoft also added a private browsing mode and session recovery. Nothing revolutionary, admittedly, but evidence that the company was at least paying attention to the rest of the browser market.

Despite Microsoft’s best efforts — including the launch of Internet Explorer 9 in 2011 — the browser war was more of a massacre. Internet Explorer and eventually Firefox started losing market share to Chrome at a frightening pace. By the end of 2010, Chrome had 14% of the market, growing to 25% by the end of 2011. At this point, Internet Explorer’s market share had dipped to 35%, and Chrome had even snatched second place from Firefox. The unthinkable finally happened in 2012, when Chrome edged ahead of IE in browser market share in the middle of the year and ended 2012 with 31% of the market compared to IE’s 26%. The age of Internet Explorer was over.

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While Apple had defined the modern smartphone with 2007’s iPhone, it wasn’t until the early 2010s that smartphones truly took off and started eating into a mobile phone market that had been dominated by what we would now call dumb phones. In 2012, smartphones accounted for nearly half of all mobile phone shipments that year, with lackluster numbers elsewhere suggesting that many consumers were switching from their old phones to embrace the Android and iOS dominated future.

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Google was no stranger to smartphones, having owned Android since 2005. Despite this, it took until 2012 for the company to bring its internet browser to smartphones. Chrome for Android debuted in beta in February 2012 for Android 4.0 devices and newer, retaining many of the desktop browser’s features — such as Incognito mode and autofill — in its mobile incarnation. Google even had syncing ready to go from the start, although it only worked in one direction — desktop to mobile — to begin with.

Apple users would have to wait a bit longer, but not too long. Brian Rakowski, the then-VP of Google’s Chrome division, unveiled Chrome for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch at Google I/O in June 2012. That said, the iOS version of Chrome arguably wasn’t really even Chrome — it had to use Mobile Safari’s WebKit backend and was thus just as slow — if not slower — than the default iOS browser. That said, it did bring a Chrome-style UI and the oh-so-handy ability to sync to desktop Chrome, a feature that reviewers loved.

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Chrome’s open-source Chromium codebase meant that other developers could put their own spin on Chrome’s code and core features, and that’s precisely what Opera did when it launched Opera 15 in 2013. Long since a bit-part player in the browser wars, the Scandinavian company opted to abandon its Presto backend and fully embrace Chromium with the 15th iteration of the browser.

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The Chromium update for Opera brought with it a selection of features that would have been familiar to Google Chrome users of the era. Opera now had a Chrome-style look and Chromium’s signature omnibox (its combined search and address bar), with an updated Speed Dial page to go along with it. The Opera team also began contributing to the Chromium codebase with the browser’s switch, playing a part in helping Google reduce Chromium’s infamous memory usage.

Opera’s rationale for the move was quite simple. WebKit, Chromium’s rendering engine, was in a good enough place that adopting it would allow the team to focus more on the browser, and not the engine powering it. In a sign of its commitment to Chromium, Opera followed Google in adopting Blink, which the latter introduced (as a fork of WebKit) only a few months after Opera 15’s release. Opera remains a Chromium-based browser, with the latest version as of November 2024 built on Chromium 125.

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By the end of 2016, Chrome’s march to the top was finally complete, in a sense. Google’s browser finally broke past the 50% market share milestone in October that month, ending the year with 51% of the browser market across all platforms. Microsoft’s once-mighty IE had a mere 4.4%, behind even Opera, and even the ever-reliable Firefox’s share had dwindled to less than 7%.

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By this point, however, Microsoft wasn’t really pinning its hopes on Internet Explorer anymore. It had launched a new browser the year before called Edge. Edge had a new rendering engine — EdgeHTML — and was the default browser for the then-new Windows 10, bringing with it updates like a new minimalist design — with a Chrome-style layout with tabs on top, of course — and Microsoft Cortana support. Despite Windows 10 getting off to a decent start, it seems like many users opted to stick to Chrome instead, with Microsoft’s latest browser only gaining 1.61% of the browser market by the end of 2016.

In an interesting twist, Chrome’s closest competitor was now Apple’s Safari. That said, despite its many advantages over Chrome, Apple’s browser wasn’t really much of a competitor. It was the second most used browser, sure, but its 14% market share was miles behind that of Chrome.

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Three years after first launching Edge, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer successor was still nowhere, barely even managing to gain 2% of the browser market. Faced with what was an undeniable flop, Microsoft announced in late 2018 that it would rebuild Edge from the ground up to make use of, you guessed it, Chromium.

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This wasn’t Microsoft’s first dalliance with open-source tech, but it was a big step for the company nonetheless. The decision would put Edge on par with other Chromium-based browsers in core features, all while bringing it in line with current web standards — in other words, the standards that Google was driving with Blink. The result? Even more Google dominance through Chromium-based browsers such as Opera, Edge, and UC Browser. Good for Google, of course, but not necessarily a development that all web developers embraced.

Microsoft’s Chromium-based Edge finally saw the light of day in 2020. The reception was surprisingly good, with journalists praising the reduced RAM and CPU usage compared to Chrome and better privacy settings, all while remaining familiar enough for Chrome users to make the switch. Microsoft even introduced some Edge-only features to the browser, further differentiating it from Chrome. The rewritten Edge fared much better than its predecessor, surpassing the old version’s market share with 3.1% by the end of 2020.

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Chrome celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2018, and Google celebrated this milestone by introducing a fresh new look for its now-dominant internet browser. Google based Chrome’s new look on Material Design, a set of principles it first introduced in 2014.

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Gone were the angled tabs that had characterized Chrome since its launch, in their place were softer, rounded tabs with the now-customary favicons. The new design also cleaned up the tab bar for easier browsing, rounded off the omnibox’s edges, and made other small UI tweaks across the browser. The color palette also changed, with Chrome now opting for subtly lighter colors than its predecessor. However, this anniversary update wasn’t purely cosmetic, even if that was the main focus. Google also introduced new functionality, such as a more powerful omnibox that could search through currently open tabs and an improved password manager.

Not everyone appreciated the new look, but whatever complaints its users had didn’t do much to harm Chrome’s stranglehold on the browser market. The end of 2018 saw Chrome hitting Internet Explorer levels of dominance, with the browser accounting for 62.3% of internet traffic with no signs of slowing down or ceding the lead to any of its rivals.

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As of October 2024, Chrome accounts for 66.6% of all browser traffic on the internet, across all platforms Updates such as a Material You refresh in 2023 and the addition of various AI and machine learning-assisted features have slowly pushed Chrome forward, all while Chromium-based browsers such as Edge, Opera, and Brave ensure that Google’s codebase dominates with or without Chrome.

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Between Google search, YouTube, Android, and Chromium-based browsers, it’s not hard to feel like Google essentially rules our digital lives. We’ll let you make up your mind about how desirable this state of affairs is, but it’s worth pointing out that not everyone is a fan. The Verge, for example, argued in 2021 that the browser market was starting to echo the days of Internet Explorer’s dominance, when sites were authored specifically to work best (or only) in Internet Explorer.

Chrome has also come under fire for its laissez-faire attitude to user privacy — Google is, after all, in the advertising and data game — while Google’s planned Manifest V3 update for Chrome’s extension API has been described as a way for Google to limit the functionality ad blockers and other privacy-protecting extensions by Electronic Frontier Foundation, amongst others. While none of these criticisms have made a huge dent in Chrome’s dominance, some of these concerns have likely helped the growth of privacy-focused browsers like Vivaldi. 

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Despite all that, it’s hard to imagine another internet browser ever taking Chrome’s place anytime soon, if ever — but, then again, that’s what many of us thought about Internet Explorer in 2004.