domeet webmaster

The answer is: radically transform the browser.

Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “CSDN” (ID:CSDNnews) By Chris Foster, translator Su Benru.

In 2008, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) browser accounted for almost 60% of the global browser market share. Mozilla’s Firefox browser is close behind, with a market share of about a third. The new Chrome browser launched by Google on September 2, 2008 has a market share of only 0.3%. Today, ten years later, the Chrome browser stands out with nearly 70% of its effective market share. What makes Google Chrome enter a new industry in a short span of ten years and dominate? The answer is: radically transform the browser.

Google viewed Chrome as a platform from the start. For Google, the browser is not only a tool for web browsing, it is also a connection point for an increasingly diverse set of tools and applications that change almost all the way online works.

The following is what this article will explore:

• Why are developers, not ordinary Internet users, the main target customers of Google?

• How does Google quickly gain significant growth in the Chrome user base in a highly competitive market?

• How does Chrome make Google more influential in the broader Internet trend?

Chrome is more than just a great browser. It’s also a good example of how individual products can challenge traditional wisdom and reshape our perception of the tools we use every day.

The pattern of the Internet in 2008 is very different from the present. The way people use the Internet is beginning to change, and Google suddenly discovers an opportunity to create a new operating system (OS) for the open Internet, and has succeeded with Microsoft’s complacency and the limitations of its IE browser exploits that it has been effortlessly discovered. .

I. 2008-2013: Rethinking the browser

The year was 2008, and Apple’s iPhone was less than a year old. Windows 7 has been on the market for several months, and people are still uneasy about the fate of Windows XP.

Yahoo has just rejected Microsoft’s offer to buy the company for $31 a share. And Microsoft’s IE browser is in full swing, firmly dominate the global web browser market.

Either from a hardware or software perspective, the ecosystem around consumer technology was very different in 2008. The launch of the iPhone smartphone is a catalyst for bringing apps to the mainstream. Even though the application at the time was not mainstream. Of course, they are already very popular, but far from being as ubiquitous as they are now.

In 2008, despite the app, web pages are still the way most people use online interactive services.

Online banking was nothing new at the time, but you still need to log in to a password-protected web page to access your account information. You may order items online, but most of them are on a desktop or laptop computer, and it’s not very likely to order items from mobile devices.

The changes in the Internet are changing with each passing day, and the web browser is unchanged. Since the introduction of the Internet Explorer (IE) browser in 1995, although Microsoft has made some improvements, in most cases, the experience of using IE for Web browsing in 2008 is not much different from that in 1998.

Google understands that if you want to achieve the promise of Web 2.0, the world needs something new. Google also understands that if it chooses the right path and moves fast enough, it has a huge potential to beat Microsoft in its own game.

Google released a beta version of the Chrome browser on September 2, 2008. In order to promote the Chrome browser to the world, Google also deliberately produced a short comic that explains why Google created its own browser.

In order to build a Chrome browser, Google has assembled an experienced development team. Prior to joining Google in 2005, Ben Goodger, who worked at Netscape and Firefox, was selected to take charge of the Chrome project, including recruiting.

Between 2005 and 2006, Google digs from FirefoxSeveral well-known developers, including Darin Fisher, Pam Greene, and Brian Ryner.

The job is to create a brand new browser based on the HTML layout engine Webkit that enables it to support “always on” web applications like Google Maps.

Although in essence, creating new network technologies faces technical challenges, the Chrome development team has a crucial advantage in this competition.

They are lightly loaded and built from scratch. Although engineers developing IE and Firefox browsers are working hard to adapt their browsers to increasingly diverse tasks and applications, they can’t get rid of the shackles of traditional technology.

However, the Chrome development team is different, they can focus on building custom tools without having to stick to any old patterns used to create browser technology.

Google decided at a very early age to “sandbox” every tab of the Chrome browser to make sure they are running in their own processes. This approach solves multiple problems.

First, it prevents a tag from causing another tag to crash, thus ensuring a more stable browsing experience. Second, it makes a single process run faster, thus ensuring the concurrent operation of multiple processes. Third, it is highly consistent with the direction of the Internet (mobile applications, not web pages).

“Our web browser should allow each tab of the browser to run in its own separate process, use multi-threading to communicate with the operating system, increase the cache size, and don’t be afraid to use more bandwidth (as long as Get) Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3.1 and Apple Safari are introducing new technologies to their Web browsers to adapt to modern devices, but the advantage of Google Chrome is that it is from scratch and can be implemented in some other browser architectures. A function that is impossible to achieve. – Niall Kennedy

Google is not tossing. Google itself admits that it is rethinking the entire concept of the browser from the ground up. Google has been looking for the most difficult core issues in browser technology and is looking for solutions that solve these problems more effectively than anyone else.

Although Google is not ashamed to announce its plans for future web browsers, its actual workings for Chrome browser development are absolutely unorthodox.

Google uses Apple’s Webkit rendering engine and Mozilla’s Firefox to build the Chrome browser, but Google’s goal is not to just build a better browser. It wants all the heatThe heart of the developer can help.

So in September 2008, Google decided to open the source code for the entire Chrome browser as part of the Chromium open source project.

There are two things that make this decision:

1. Opening the source code for the Chromium project provides Google with a better way to continually improve the Chrome browser.

2. Thanks to the advocacy of organizations such as the open source community and Mozilla, Chrome and the increasingly popular open web standards maintain a high degree of consistency.

Google’s open source initiative didn’t hurt Google’s biggest goal at the time, Microsoft, and Microsoft took the opposite approach – keeping it closed – to develop IE.

In July 2009, after nine months of official Chrome release, more than 30 million people have used the Chrome browser to access web pages. At this time, people noticed that the Chrome browser is very fast. At the same time, in July 2009, Google announced the upcoming Chrome OS.

“We designed the operating system to be fast and lightweight, and it can be started in seconds and connected to the network. The user interface is the most simplified and will not hinder your work, most user experience will It happens on the web. As we did on Google Chrome, we will return to the basics and completely redesign the underlying security architecture of the operating system so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It is feasible.”- Google

In December 2009, Google launched the Chrome extension library. Contains a number of third-party plugins that users can install in Chrome that provide additional functionality for the browser. This extension library demonstrates Chrome’s ability to scale.

Extensions, plugins, and add-ons may be ubiquitous today, but in 2009, this was a concept of current security. In addition to the sandboxed tags that may be exceptions, extensions can be said to be the hallmark of Chrome as a browser product. They are also very popular.

In December 2010, it was launched at Google.Just a year later, the Chrome extension library has more than 8,500 extensions and more than 1,500 browser themes that can be accessed through the extension library. Of the more than 120 million Chrome users, about one-third have installed at least one extension, and more than 70 million extensions and themes are installed across the Chrome user base.

The Chrome browser experienced tremendous growth in 2010, and the number of users has tripled from 40 million at the beginning of the year to 120 million at the end of the year. The speed of Chrome is the main reason for this rapid growth.

In the meantime, in addition to the user base, Google’s share of the browser market has also increased significantly. At the end of 2009, Chrome’s market share was only about 5%. And just one year later, it has a 15% market share.

“Chrome makes the dream of web browsing come true, and it has been improving. The teams of Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera should pay attention: Chrome has grown into a strong rival. – Farhad Manjoo, Salon.com /p>

People expect a faster, lighter browser, and Chrome does it. By the end of 2010, Internet Explorer may still be the mainstream browser, but Google is getting closer. The irony is that Google beat Microsoft in Microsoft’s own game.

Because of the fight against the federal government’s struggle to tie IE to Windows to effectively control the market’s anti-competitive practices, Microsoft quickly found itself on the verge of failure of the same strategy.

And by giving people a faster and lighter alternative than IE, Google has given people the option of using Chrome as their default browser, gaining an invaluable advantage over Microsoft. From here on, it’s a simple jump, making Google the default search engine for Chrome users.

Google’s perfect collection in 2010 is the launch of the Chrome Web Store. The original Chrome Web App Store is limited to the US, and it is a larger, better embodiment of the Google Extensions library.

Users can browse and install through the Chrome Web App StoreExtensions, plugins, and themes from thousands of independent developers. Chrome’s features are made more comprehensive through extensions and plug-ins provided by the Chrome Web App Store. It also makes extension a key part of the broader Chrome ecosystem, an intelligent long-term game based on Chrome’s extensibility, with a focus on user needs and expectations.

Like the Firefox plugin, the Chrome browser extension is not only a popular gadget to help users do more things on the browser, they are also a pioneer in a new round of software products. By putting users in the first place, the entire software industry is finally reshaped. Let us take Adblock Plus as an example.

Adblock Plus is one of the oldest browser extensions on the web and has been around since 2007. It has been downloaded and installed millions of times. One of the easiest and most effective extensions to Chrome and Firefox.

It has changed people’s perceptions of traditional online publishing on their own, and has also changed the viability of some online advertising business models. One might say that Adblock Plus is an extension developed by a single publisher that has helped us create the subscription model that is now available everywhere, from streaming entertainment services to SaaS. Adblock Plus is so popular that it really helps change the way the Internet works. This is why the extension is so powerful.

In early 2011, Google basically did not have any action. In March 2011, when Chrome first made major design changes, the situation changed. The original Chrome logo was designed in a three-dimensional metal style to match the name of the product.

However, in 2011, Chrome’s 3D logo was outdated. According to the new trend of “planar design” pioneered by Apple, it is obviously necessary to update it. Chrome’s new, simpler, cleaner logo reflects the “easy and no-waste” experience of using the product. The blue logo of the open source Chromium project has also been revised accordingly.

After the Chrome logo was modified, Google announced the launch of the Chromebook series of netbooks. Google sees Chromebooks as the future of lightweight portable computing. These machines do not have a traditional hard drive and cannot be installed with software.

Instead, they run the Chrome OS and use the Chrome browser itself as the primary means of users accessing the Web.

In October 2011, Google quietly updated the Chrome browser to bring in the next new feature that other browsers will soon emulate – the new Tab Page – introduced. Tabs are a revolution for many Internet users, allowing people to experience true online multitasking. Before the advent of tabbed browsing, most people might not open a new browser window for each task they want to work with.

The

tag not only makes this online workflow possible, but it is also preferable. However, until now, opening a new label has always been a missed opportunity. Because the new label is always a blank page, except for the user’s predefined home page.

Currently, Chrome’s New Tab Page gives users quick access to their most popular extensions, pages, and sites. This implementation makes Chrome more like an app.

Google’s next step is to extend Chrome’s footprint beyond Windows. In February 2012, Google released the Chrome browser for Android.

Google’s loyal supporters have been patiently waiting for the Android browser to appear for years. For the release of the Chrome browser for Android, the only thing that surprised people was how long it took Google to release it.

After three months of the final release of the Chrome browser for Android, Google released its latest hardware product, Chromebox, a small device designed to work like a desktop powered by Chrome OS. However, like the previous Chromebooks, Chromebox is not impressive.

The biggest problem with Chromebox is not necessarily the product itself, although many analysts and technical journalists have noticed the high price and low spec of Chromebox. Its biggest problem is that the demand is not enough.

When Google first proposed the idea of ​​a lightweight laptop designed and optimized for cloud computing, the concept was hopeful. However, things changed almost overnight on April 3, 2010. That same day, Apple introduced the first iPad.