Thread by @hnshah

This article I wrote about Google Chrome was one of my favorites to research and come up with a point of view to write about.

Here's a thread on what I learned...

usefyi.com/chrome-history/

The folks working on @googlechrome early on really nailed it.

They...

Started from scratch to rethink the browser from the ground up.
Assembled an all-start team of browser experts.
Focused on developers first.
Nailed the tech to improve the experience for consumers 10X.

When Chrome was just an idea, they had an advantage similar to a startup.

The incumbents had legacy tech that they were trying to adapt to the new world we called Web 2.0 back then.

Just like a startup...

Chrome was starting from scratch with no legacy, tech debt or users.

The first few engineering hires on the Chrome team were made by @bengoodger who calls himself a “browzr wizrd” 🤓

They poached @darinwf, Pam Greene, Brian Ryner and others from Microsoft and Mozilla.

This post has more details: niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/09/g…

Google Chrome was launched with a short comic explaining the technical advantages for consumers the team had built into it.

My favorite is this explanation of how the “chrome process manager” worked to contain crashes that would cause havoc with other browsers.

Just like a startup, the Chrome team found the most painful problems people had with browsers and were committed to solving them better than the competition.

This was impressive because they had to solve problems developers had building for the web and also ones consumers had.

The history of Chrome Extensions is really fascinating and was a very obvious evolution of toolbars in hindsight.

Extensions launched and most of the iterations were to increase security.

Something browser toolbars never really iterated on!

Here’s a timeline of the evolution:

Google’s strategy for Chrome can be summed up in two words:

Chrome Everywhere

10 years
0 to 70% market share
Over a billion users

And 6,960 words later, I think I’ve covered everything you need to know about how @googlechrome ate the Internet as we know it...

usefyi.com/chrome-history/