The rise of Chrome

Jonathan Tamary,Dror G Feitelson

doi:10.7717/peerj-cs.28

Abstract

Since Chrome’s initial release in 2008 it has grown in market share, and now controls roughly half of the desktop browsers market. In contrast with Internet Explorer, the previous dominant browser, this was not achieved by marketing practices such as bundling the browser with a pre-loaded operating system. This raises the question of how Chrome achieved this remarkable feat, while other browsers such as Firefox and Opera were left behind. We show that both the performance of Chrome and its conformance with relevant standards are typically better than those of the two main contending browsers, Internet Explorer and Firefox. In addition, based on a survey of the importance of 25 major features, Chrome product managers seem to have made somewhat better decisions in selecting where to put effort. Thus the rise of Chrome is consistent with technical superiority over the competition.

Highlights

The most notable use of the Internet is the World Wide Web (WWW)
The first web browser was developed at CERN as part of the WWW project
The first popular browser, which set the growth of the web in motion towards the wide use we see today, was Mosaic, which was developed by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in 1993 (Vetter, Spell & Ward, 1994)

Summary

Introduction

The most notable use of the Internet is the World Wide Web (WWW). The web was created by Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research) in 1989. The first web browser (which was named WorldWideWeb) was developed at CERN as part of the WWW project The first popular browser, which set the growth of the web in motion towards the wide use we see today, was Mosaic, which was developed by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in 1993 (Vetter, Spell & Ward, 1994). The competition between browsers has led to several “browser wars”—periods of fierce competition between different web browsers that are characterized by technological innovation and aggressive marketing, typically leading to the eventual dominance of one browser and the fall of another. In recent years we have witnessed such a shift (albeit somewhat protracted) from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer to Google’s Chrome

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