Google Chrome is the web browser Google launched in 2008. The company announced it on its official blog in a post titled “A fresh take on the browser,” dated September 1, 2008, and made the browser available to the public the following day. Google’s stated reason for building a browser was that the web had changed from simple pages into rich applications, and the team wanted a browser designed for that new web.
Chrome was built on the open-source WebKit rendering engine, which it shared with Apple’s Safari, and on a new high-performance JavaScript engine called V8. Google paired this with a multi-process architecture, so that each tab ran in its own process and a single misbehaving page would be less likely to crash the whole browser.
In April 2013 Google announced on the Chromium blog that the project would fork WebKit into a new rendering engine called Blink. The post explained that Chromium’s distinct multi-process architecture had made supporting a shared engine increasingly complex, and that a separate engine would let the project simplify its codebase and innovate faster. Since then Chrome has been built on Blink and V8.
Over the years that followed its launch, Chrome grew to become the most widely used web browser, and its underlying Chromium project became the foundation for many other browsers as well.