Google Chrome

Google Chrome is the basis of Google's Chrome OS operating system that ships on specific hardware from Google's manufacturing partners.


Mozilla said that Chrome's introduction into the web browser market comes as "no real surprise", that "Chrome is not aimed at competing with Firefox", and furthermore that it would not affect Google's revenue relationship with Mozilla.


On January 11, 2011 the Chrome Product manager, Mike Jazayeri, announced that Chrome will no longer support H.264 video codec for its HTML5 player, citing the desire to bring Google Chrome more inline with the currently available open codecs available in the Chromium project, which Chrome is based on.


The normal downloaded Chrome installer puts the browser in the user's local app data directory and provides invisible background updates, but the MSI package will allow installation at the system level, providing system administrators control over the update process – it was formerly possible only when Chrome was installed using Google Pack.


Chromium, unlike the pre-release versions of Chrome, is updated almost every day, but does not include the built-in Flash Player (it has to be downloaded separately) and Google Auto-updater found in Chrome.
However Chrome was the first browser to to be defeated at Pwn2Own 2012, by a French team who used zero day exploits to take complete control of a fully patched 64-bit Windows 7 PC using a booby-trapped website that overcame Chrome's sandboxing.


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.
They unanimously reported that Chrome performed much faster than all competitors against which it had been tested, including Safari (for Windows), Firefox 3.0, Internet Explorer 7, Opera, and Internet Explorer 8. However in more recent independent tests of JavaScript performance, Chrome has been scoring just behind Opera's Presto engine since it was updated in version 10.5.


Chrome utilizes the faster, SPDY protocol instead of HTTP when communicating with Google services, such as Google Search, Gmail, Chrome sync and when serving Google's ads.


The Chrome Web Store was opened on February 11, 2011 with the release of Google Chrome 9.0.