Google Chrome is a web browser developed by Google and based on the WebKit layout engine and application framework. It was first released as a beta version for Microsoft Windows on September 2, 2008, and the public stable release was on December 11, 2008. The name is derived from the graphical user interface frame, or "chrome", of web browsers. In April 2009, Chrome was the fourth most widely used browser, with 1.42% of worldwide usage share of web browsers.

Chromium is the open source project behind Google Chrome. The Google-authored portion of it is released under the BSD license, with other parts being subject to a variety of different permissive open-source licenses, including the MIT License, the LGPL, the Ms-PL and a MPL/GPL/LGPL tri-license. It implements the same feature set as Chrome, but has a slightly different logo.

Announcement

The release announcement was originally scheduled for September 3, 2008, and a comic by Scott McCloud was to be sent to journalists and bloggers explaining the features of and motivations for the new browser. Copies intended for Europe were shipped early and German blogger Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped made a scanned copy of the 38-page comic available on his website after receiving it on September 1, 2008. Google subsequently made the comic available on Google Books and their site and mentioned it on its official blog along with an explanation for the early release.

Public release

thumb|200px|right|The Chromium Test Shell on Linux A pre-alpha version of Chromium for Linux, showing the default warning home page.

The browser was first publicly released for Microsoft Windows (XP and later only) on September 2, 2008 in 43 languages, officially a beta version. Chrome quickly gained about 1% market share. Mac OS X and Linux versions are under development. In the end of 2008, a message saying that a "test shell" is available to build on Linux was placed in the Chromium project's developer wiki. Some have tried this shell, which apparently lacked many features, but appeared to function quite well in rendering web sites (including JavaScript). In March 2009, the test shell was replaced by a pre-alpha version of the Chromium browser, which looks similar to the Windows release, but is still very far from complete.

On September 2, a CNET news item drew attention to a passage in the terms of service for the initial beta release, which seemed to grant to Google a license to all content transferred via the Chrome browser. The passage in question was inherited from the general Google terms of service. On the same day, Google responded to this criticism by stating that the language used was borrowed from other products, and removed the passage in question from the Terms of Service. Google noted that this change would "apply retroactively to all users who have downloaded Google Chrome." There were subsequent concern and confusion about whether and what information the program communicates back to Google. The company stated that usage metrics are only sent when users opt in by checking the option "help make Google Chrome better by automatically sending usage statistics and crash reports to Google" when the browser is installed.