Happy 2nd Birthday: Google Chrome Surges In Popularity

A slightly belated “happy second anniversary” to the Google Chrome web browser, which debuted September 2, 2008. And Google’s marked the occasion with the launch of a Chrome 6.0. Here’s a quick look back at the birthday browser, and Chrome’s growing popularity with The VAR Guy’s readership.

Google Chrome’s big innovation two years ago was its “sandboxed” approach to browsing. Every tab in Chrome is essentially its own instance of the browser, meaning that when plugins like Adobe Flash inevitably crash it doesn’t tear down the entire browser. When it launched, The VAR Guy noticed that 4% of all our readers were using Google Chrome as quickly as a week after release, and it looks to continue that momentum. Today, roughly 19% of readers use Google Chrome to browse The VAR Guy’s web site.

Chrome has seen improvements like Mac and Linux versions, browser themes, password manager, extensions, and HTML5 support – that last one best exemplified in this impressive collaboration between Google and indie darling rockers Arcade Fire.

And with Chrome 6.0, Google’s opted not to rock the boat, stripping down the already pretty spare user interface even more, readjusting button locations, improving overall performance and tweaking the color scheme, but otherwise leaving its core aspects in place.

Back in January 2010, I explained why I decided to ditch Mozilla Firefox for Google Chrome. And the truth is, I’ve never looked back. Happy birthday to a personal favorite piece of software.

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