Which company created the Chrome web browser?
Answer
Google created the Chrome web browser, which it first released publicly in 2008.
Chrome was developed as Google expanded beyond search and web services. The company began work on an independent browser in 2006, with Sundar Pichai helping lead development. Google also hired developers with experience from Mozilla and built Chrome using components from several open-source projects.
Chrome’s first public release was a beta for Microsoft Windows on September 2, 2008. A stable Windows version followed in December, while versions for macOS and Linux arrived later. Google designed Chrome around speed, security, separate processes for tabs, and stronger support for increasingly interactive web applications.
Chrome is based largely on Chromium, Google’s open-source browser project, but the Chrome product itself includes Google-specific features and branding. Its original rendering engine was WebKit; Google later created Blink, which became Chrome’s main rendering engine on most platforms. Chrome is a browser—not the same thing as ChromeOS, the operating system built around it.