When the Web arrived, in the early nineties, to surf it we started using Netscape, which was a startup and it was a wonder. Then Microsoft created Internet Explorer and the browser war began.
Twenty years have passed and that war was won by Google. Today Google’s browser, Chrome, has two thirds of the market, followed by Apple’s (Safari). The start of the comeback was December 11, 2008: that day Google released the first stable version of Chrome, which had actually been around for a few months already. Had debuted on September 4 accompanied by a bizarre graphic novel, made by designer Scott McCloud, in which some guys explained why the time had come for a better browser: faster, more stable, more secure. The texts of the story were signed “the Google Chrome Team”. But who was this team led by? From a young Indian engineer who joined Google 4 years earlier: Sundar Pichai, today the absolute head of Alphabet, the parent company of the group. As a freshman, Pichai was responsible for developing the Google toolbar inside the two browsers that were the most popular, Firefox and Explorer: in fact it was (and still is) a way to easily access the Google search engine. But by doing this Pichai had convinced himself that it was more convenient for Google to develop his own browser. And he had convinced the two founders to give him the go-ahead.
From the technological point of view Chrome did not start from scratch, but from the software developed by Webkit and Mozilla, that in fact in the last page of the graphic novel are explicitly mentioned and thanked: “We have a great debt towards them and we hope to find people who will do the same with us to carry on the Web”. In reality it did not go quite like this: Chrome, thanks to an unbeatable user experience, has become an absolute market leader despite authoritative criticisms have highlighted the excessive intrusion into user privacy; and Sundar Pichai, after having also taken command of Android and the development of all the products of the Google world, since 2015 he has become the number one of Google and from 2019 also of Alphabet.
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