Google Chrome

Google Chrome (or Chrome) is a freeware web browser developed by Google that was first released on September 2, 2008 for Microsoft Windows, and has had support for MacOS and Linux since May 2010.

A majority of the browser's source code is released by Google as the Chromium open-source project, but Chrome is released as proprietary freeware. Until version 27, Chrome used the WebKit layout engine; starting with version 28, all Chrome ports except the iOS port use a fork of the WebKit engine called Blink.

Google Chrome has a large portion of the world usage share of web browsers, and its success has led to Google expanding the "Chrome" brand name to various other products such as the Chromecast, Chromebook, and Chromebox.

History
An announcement was made on Google's blog on September 1, 2008, with a beta version of the browser being released the next day that supported 43 languages and ran on Windows XP onward. Chrome became a stable public release on December 11, 2008.

Chrome quickly gained around 1% usage share before hitting a low of 0.69% in October 2008. By December 2008 it had again passed the 1% threshold.

In early January 2009, CNET reported that Google planned to release versions of Chrome for OS X and Linux in the first half of the year. Developer previews of the browser for OS X and Linux were announced on June 4, 2009 with a blog post saying they were missing many features and were intended for early feedback instead of general use.

In December 2009, Google released beta versions of Chrome for OS X and Linux, and Google Chrome 5.0 was released on May 25, 2010 – the first stable release to support all three platforms.

In 2010, Google Chrome was one of the twelve browsers offered to European Economic Area users of Microsoft Windows.

Development
Chrome was assembled from 25 different code libraries from Google and third-parties, including but not limited to Mozilla's Netscape Portable Runtime, Network Security Services, Skia Graphics Engine, and SQLite.

Chrome initially used the WebKit rendering engine to display web pages. In 2013, they forked the WebCore component and created their own layout engine, Blink.

On February 7, 2012, Google launched Google Chrome Beta for Android 4.0 devices. On newer devices with Android 4.1 and later preinstalled, Chrome is the default browser.

Platforms
Chrome runs on:
 * Windows 7 or later
 * OS X 10.10 or later
 * 64-bit versions of Ubuntu 14.04+, Debian 8+, openSUSE 13.1+ and Fedora 21+
 * Android 6.0 or later
 * iOS 12 or later

Android
A beta version of Chrome was launched on February 7, 2012 for a limited number of countries for Android 4.0 devices. It exited beta and became stable on June 27, 2012.

Chrome OS
Google Chrome is the foundation of Google's Chrome OS operating system that ships on specific hardware from Google's manufacturing partners. The user interface has a minimalist design resembling the Chrome browser. The operating system is aimed at users who spend most of their computer time on the Web; the only applications on the devices are a browser incorporating a media player and a file manager.

iOS
Chrome is available for iOS, Apple's mobile operating system. Released on the Apple App Store on June 26, 2012, it supports the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch and requires that the device has iOS 10.0 or greater installed. This version of Chrome is forced to use iOS WebKit – Apple's own mobile rendering engine, developed for their Safari web browser – due to Apple's requirements for browsers released through the App Store; as a result, Google is restricted from using their own V8 JavaScript engine. Chrome is the default web browser for the iOS Gmail application, but it cannot be used as the device-wide default application for opening web pages because Apple has not provided iOS users with the option to change the default from Safari.

Windows
Support for Google Chrome on Windows XP and Windows Vista ended in April 2016, with version 49.0.2623.112 being the last supported version on both operating systems.

macOS
Chrome 21 dropped support for Mac OS X 10.5, and support for 32-bit versions of Chrome ended in October 2014 starting with Chrome 39. Support for Mac OS X 10.6, 10.7, and 10.8 ended in April 2016 with the release of Chrome 50.

Linux
On Linux distributions, support for 32-bit Intel processors ended in March 2016, although Chromium is still supported. As of Chrome 26, Linux installations of the browser may be updated only on systems that support GCC v4.6 and GTK v2.24 or later. Thus deprecated systems include (for example) Debian 6's 2.20, and RHEL 6's 2.18.