WEBVTT

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Now, I know some of you guys saw the title of this video and were like, nah, I use Safari,

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or Opera, or Vivaldi. And those are all fine choices, but hopefully you know what I mean.

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At the beginning of 2021, Chrome had nearly 70% of the desktop web browsing market. And unlike

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some other fields where you might only have a couple of choices like CPUs, it's trivial for you

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to just go and download whichever browser you want. So why have so many of us gone with Chrome,

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especially as it's not even pre-installed on many desktops? To answer, we need to first take a look

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way back at Chrome's origins. Back in 2008, when Chrome first hit the scene, Internet Explorer

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still ruled the world, sadly, due in large part to its shipping as the default browser for Windows

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systems. But good old IE was notorious for being error prone and subject to frequent crashes.

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The open source alternative, Firefox, was gaining popularity. And while it was mostly more stable

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than Internet Explorer, both browsers suffered from the fact that they'd been around for a while,

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and their underlying architectures were built for a more static internet with more static web pages.

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Google realized that the web was heading much more towards sites that behaved like programs

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in your browser, think Google Maps or Dropbox, and that supporting this kind of content natively

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would give their browser a huge leg up. So Chrome was built from the ground up with this kind of

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content as the focus, along with a couple of technical tricks to make it more likely that

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these fancy web apps would run well. One is a feature called sandboxing, where each Chrome tab

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would run its own process, so if one tab crashed, it would be more likely that the others would be

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unaffected. This contrast with how Internet Explorer ran every window or tab in this same

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process, so an error in one window would often bring down the whole browser, as anyone who's

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familiar with those old Internet Explorer has stopped working messages should remember well.

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While this is also part of the reason Chrome is a notorious memory hog,

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it did make the browser more stable, and Chrome also generally ran faster,

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meaning it was already pretty far ahead from a technical standpoint. But what really helped

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this popularity take off was the fact that Chrome's philosophy was to support open source

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web standards that were starting to become popular with developers. In fact, Chrome's source code was

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made open source very early on as part of their Chromium project, which made it easier for developers

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to understand how the browser worked and how to write web apps that would work well with it.

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The combination of Chrome both being more stable and having better support for a quickly evolving

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web, not to mention having the Google brand name behind it and its support for

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useful browser extensions rather than janky toolbars, meant it quickly gained a following.

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The browser hit 10% adoption in mid-2010, but by early 2015,

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it had more desktop users than all the other browsers combined.

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As time has gone on, Google has stuck with the philosophy of keeping a streamlined interface

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that plays well with most web standards while expanding integration with Google's own services.

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Unsurprisingly, this has earned Chrome a fair bit of backlash over privacy concerns,

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and Google still hasn't quite figured out how to keep it from hogging memory,

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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

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to another browser, similar to what happened to Internet Explorer. Even Microsoft's Edge browser,

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built to succeed IE and compete with Chrome, has switched to being a Chromium-based program,

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so it doesn't look like Chrome's dominance will end anytime soon, unless Elon Musk can get a

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browser called Platinum off the ground or something like that. I don't know.

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I mean the guy can do anything really. Doge browser. So thanks for watching guys, if you liked this video, hit like, hit subscribe,

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and be sure to hit us up in the comments section with your suggestions for videos

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that we should cover in the future.