Now, I know some of you guys saw the title of this video and were like, nah, I use Safari,
or Opera, or Vivaldi. And those are all fine choices, but hopefully you know what I mean.
At the beginning of 2021, Chrome had nearly 70% of the desktop web browsing market. And unlike
some other fields where you might only have a couple of choices like CPUs, it's trivial for you
to just go and download whichever browser you want. So why have so many of us gone with Chrome,
especially as it's not even pre-installed on many desktops? To answer, we need to first take a look
way back at Chrome's origins. Back in 2008, when Chrome first hit the scene, Internet Explorer
still ruled the world, sadly, due in large part to its shipping as the default browser for Windows
systems. But good old IE was notorious for being error prone and subject to frequent crashes.
The open source alternative, Firefox, was gaining popularity. And while it was mostly more stable
than Internet Explorer, both browsers suffered from the fact that they'd been around for a while,
and their underlying architectures were built for a more static internet with more static web pages.
Google realized that the web was heading much more towards sites that behaved like programs
in your browser, think Google Maps or Dropbox, and that supporting this kind of content natively
would give their browser a huge leg up. So Chrome was built from the ground up with this kind of
content as the focus, along with a couple of technical tricks to make it more likely that
these fancy web apps would run well. One is a feature called sandboxing, where each Chrome tab
would run its own process, so if one tab crashed, it would be more likely that the others would be
unaffected. This contrast with how Internet Explorer ran every window or tab in this same
process, so an error in one window would often bring down the whole browser, as anyone who's
familiar with those old Internet Explorer has stopped working messages should remember well.
While this is also part of the reason Chrome is a notorious memory hog,
it did make the browser more stable, and Chrome also generally ran faster,
meaning it was already pretty far ahead from a technical standpoint. But what really helped
this popularity take off was the fact that Chrome's philosophy was to support open source
web standards that were starting to become popular with developers. In fact, Chrome's source code was
made open source very early on as part of their Chromium project, which made it easier for developers
to understand how the browser worked and how to write web apps that would work well with it.
The combination of Chrome both being more stable and having better support for a quickly evolving
web, not to mention having the Google brand name behind it and its support for
useful browser extensions rather than janky toolbars, meant it quickly gained a following.
The browser hit 10% adoption in mid-2010, but by early 2015,
it had more desktop users than all the other browsers combined.
As time has gone on, Google has stuck with the philosophy of keeping a streamlined interface
that plays well with most web standards while expanding integration with Google's own services.
Unsurprisingly, this has earned Chrome a fair bit of backlash over privacy concerns,
and Google still hasn't quite figured out how to keep it from hogging memory,
although they are working on both these issues. But Chrome's design continues to keep people from getting angry to the point where they switched
to another browser, similar to what happened to Internet Explorer. Even Microsoft's Edge browser,
built to succeed IE and compete with Chrome, has switched to being a Chromium-based program,
so it doesn't look like Chrome's dominance will end anytime soon, unless Elon Musk can get a
browser called Platinum off the ground or something like that. I don't know.
I mean the guy can do anything really. Doge browser. So thanks for watching guys, if you liked this video, hit like, hit subscribe,
and be sure to hit us up in the comments section with your suggestions for videos
that we should cover in the future.