As the browser turns 10, one may ask how Google justifies how Chrome has bloated over its formative years. Indeed, what may do for Chrome is its seemingly ravenous appetite for system resources. Thanks to a lack of meaningful competition from Microsoft, Chrome quickly became the dominant desktop browser in spite of a late effort from Redmond in the form of Edge and Firefox attempting to trim back some of its own bloat as the memory footprint of Google's browser continued to grow. We also noted that it was a vehicle for delivering web applications, something that would come to pass in the form of Chrome OS a year later. We took a look and came away impressed by Google's offspring, particularly its HTML 5 support, which was sorely lacking in Microsoft's competing product. The browser's arrival was greeted with much excitement, particularly by users still making do with the lumbering beast that was Internet Explorer 8. Perhaps time for a diet?Īs Google's competitors were waking up to the dominance of the Chocolate Factory's search engine, Google took a stab at Microsoft's dominance of the desktop with a light, fast browser in the form of Chrome back in 2008. Thankfully, "don't be creepy" was left off the corporate masthead as the search giant enters its third decade seeking new ways to maximise advertising revenue. 20 years since incorporation, that market cap is $852.17bn.
Excite passed on the opportunity and instead watched Google go for IPO in 2004, making $1.67bn with a market capitalisation of $23bn. Stanford students Larry Page and Sergey Brin had already collaborated on a search engine called BackRub (named for the PageRank algorithm that ranked a website by how many pages linked back to it – geddit?) before renaming the thing "Google" as a play on the mathematical term Googol (a 1 followed by 100 zeroes).Īt a time when web searching was dominated by the likes of Yahoo !, Excite and Alta Vista, the refreshingly uncluttered Google front page, along with a perceived higher degree of accuracy over its peers, helped the popularity of the site soar.īrin and Page tried to cash out of their baby shortly after incorporation and offered to sell up to Excite for the princely sum of $1m in 1999. It is 20 years ago today that ad-slinger Google filed for incorporation and the behemoth that we all know and - some - love came into being via a jerry-rigged rack of servers in a Menlo Park garage. Birthday cake makers, rejoice! There's a trio of tech industry milestones to celebrate or maybe commiserate.
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