Google Chrome, every mention
98 scenes · ← back to Google Chrome
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone David Rosenthal 35Ben Gilbert 34Brendan Eich 28Brandon Millman 1
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Google Chrome comes up
Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI? (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 18:30 David Rosenthal This is the era of all the great, great products coming out of Google that we've talked about, you know, Maps and Gmail and Docs and all the wonderful things that Chrome and Android are going to come later.
- ▶ 3:15:47 Ben Gilbert They did not need to spin off Chrome, and they did not need to stop sending tens of billions of dollars to Apple and others.
- ▶ 3:40:46 David Rosenthal Everything that we talked about in part two, the alphabet episode, all of the other products within Google, Gmail, Maps, Docs, Chrome, Android,
Google Part II: Alphabet (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:22 Ben Gilbert Of course, YouTube, then Android, and their own web browser with Chrome.
- ▶ 54:31 David Rosenthal So, as we were researching Google's expansion here from Just Search into being a real platform company here in the 2000 with Gmail, Chrome, Android, Workspace, everything we're gonna get to later in the episode, the complexity just…
- ▶ 1:55:26 Ben Gilbert I mean, it was earth shattering when Google launched Chrome.
- ▶ 1:55:35 David Rosenthal And when I say people launching web browsers today are using Chromium, Chromium, of course, is the open source version of Chrome that Google just gives away for free to anybody.
- ▶ 1:56:53 David Rosenthal And fortunately, by this time, in 2008, Google had its competitive response, all ready, ready to go, which was Chrome.
- ▶ 1:57:09 David Rosenthal The story of Chrome goes all the way back
- ▶ 2:03:39 David Rosenthal So, 2006, they finally decide, okay, it's time to start work on Chrome.
- ▶ 2:04:45 Ben Gilbert And Larry has this quote when they're deciding that they should roll out Chrome, and he kind of explains, we have found the web-based service delivery model
- ▶ 2:05:06 David Rosenthal And so, before Chrome, this is impossible to remember now, but if you had a tab or a window open and running a web app and that web app crashed, it took down your whole browser.
- ▶ 2:06:06 David Rosenthal So, of course, the web browser ultimately comes to be called Chrome, which is ironic.
- ▶ 2:06:19 David Rosenthal The idea with Chrome is, and the Google web browser is going to be minimal Chrome as little as possible.
- ▶ 2:08:43 David Rosenthal Gosh, remembering back, I mean, before Chrome and modern web browsers, browsing the web was like a security threat to your PC, right?
- ▶ 2:09:26 David Rosenthal With, the way this is so Google, the way they decide to launch it is they hire the famous comic artist Scott McCloud to illustrate a digital comic book as like a introduction to Chrome, explaining what it is, and like a user manual in a…
- ▶ 2:10:05 David Rosenthal But that was exactly the right Seed Crystal user base to get Chrome into.
- ▶ 2:10:31 David Rosenthal I'm gonna install Chrome on my parents' computers.
- ▶ 2:10:55 Ben Gilbert I think the launch of Chrome and the peak of Firefox are right around the same time.
- ▶ 2:11:21 David Rosenthal When Chrome launched in 2008, Internet Explorer had almost 70% market share of browsers, and Firefox had most of the rest.
- ▶ 2:11:30 David Rosenthal Two years later, like you said, Chrome had passed a hundred million users.
- ▶ 2:11:35 David Rosenthal By 2012, so four years after launch, Chrome and Internet Explorer are now tied for market share with about 30% each.
- ▶ 2:11:44 David Rosenthal So Internet Explorer has gone from 70% down to 30%, and this is both Chrome on the desktop side, but you're now also well into the rise of mobile, and so Apple's mobile Safari is now becoming huge,
- ▶ 2:12:02 David Rosenthal Two years after that in 2014, Chrome is now the clear leader with 40% market share.
- ▶ 2:12:25 David Rosenthal Chrome has almost 70% market share, according to Cloudflare.
- ▶ 2:12:42 David Rosenthal So, Chrome has 70%.
- ▶ 2:12:55 David Rosenthal Chrome was massive.
- ▶ 2:13:08 Ben Gilbert In a lot of years, it was actually faster than Chrome, and they would go back and forth, and it really spurred Apple, who was already a steward of WebKit, and they sort of had their own competitive response to Microsoft after Steve Jobs…
- ▶ 2:14:01 David Rosenthal I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that Chrome kept the web alive.
- ▶ 2:14:29 David Rosenthal So there's one more amazing, delicious part of the Chrome story.
- ▶ 2:15:14 David Rosenthal For all those poor souls, Google was there for you with the Google Chrome frame plugin that let you run Chrome quality web apps within Internet Explorer.
- ▶ 2:15:28 Ben Gilbert So I have a question for you on Chrome before we finish this story.
- ▶ 2:16:41 Ben Gilbert If they need to go and split some rev share and pay, you know, someone who makes, uh, some variant of Chrome based on Chromium, and that gets really big and it gets 30% of the market,
- ▶ 2:19:46 Ben Gilbert And they, like, put their finger on the scale where they need to and take a little bit more control and ownership, like with Chrome, or like with some of these standards bodies, to push the web forward to make sure that the place where…
- ▶ 2:20:14 David Rosenthal Well, no doubt, Chrome was a huge success.
- ▶ 2:20:30 Ben Gilbert What if Google didn't launch Chrome?
- ▶ 2:20:33 Ben Gilbert Let's say Bing launches in 2009 and there is no Chrome and Microsoft still has 70% share and will for a while.
- ▶ 2:21:12 Ben Gilbert To your point, maybe without Chrome, Bing would have been a serious competitor to Google.
- ▶ 2:21:31 Ben Gilbert If the DOJ's ruling is that Google has to divest Chrome, there is one way that Chrome is a business, and that is getting paid by Google to drive traffic to Google as a search engine.
- ▶ 2:21:55 Ben Gilbert Google owns Chrome, or someone else owns Chrome, and then Google pays them.
- ▶ 2:21:59 Ben Gilbert But the thing you definitely can't make it legal, or I don't really understand what the goal is if you make it illegal, is if you say they both can't own Chrome, and they can't pay web browsers to drive traffic.
- ▶ 2:22:11 Ben Gilbert Chrome has no potential of being a business if that's the case.
- ▶ 2:22:14 David Rosenthal So, Chrome.
- ▶ 2:22:23 David Rosenthal Well, gosh, maybe we should build Chrome into an operating system in and of itself.
- ▶ 2:23:50 Ben Gilbert But Google Chrome, I mean, they could do a little thing, and they did push it on Google search pages, but they managed to get a lot of distribution just by being a great product on the market with viral adoption that everyone told their…
- ▶ 2:24:13 Ben Gilbert And it's not just Chrome.
- ▶ 2:29:28 David Rosenthal Hiroshi led Android and Chrome at Google for many, many years and would be the authority on this.
- ▶ 2:48:00 David Rosenthal And then in September of 2008, a lot of things happened in September of 2008, Chrome, Android, Lehman Brothers, Google announces the T-Mobile G one phone, the G phone.
- ▶ 3:13:41 Ben Gilbert So our hero here, who is starting to gather more responsibilities, it was just the application clients, and then it was Chrome.
- ▶ 3:13:50 Ben Gilbert And in 2013, it becomes Chrome and Android.
- ▶ 3:16:32 Ben Gilbert By the way, can we just pause and say, 2009, this is like right after Chrome, right after Android.
- ▶ 3:17:03 David Rosenthal It was so interesting doing the research for this episode because so many of the people we talked to, even people who were leaders of a lot of these products, because Google was so decentralized and so siloed, they were focused on their…
- ▶ 3:19:33 Ben Gilbert Android, Chrome, Search, YouTube, developer relations, trying to sort of will a Google platform into existence.
- ▶ 3:19:57 Ben Gilbert Chrome is starting to do the same stuff as Android.
- ▶ 3:20:02 Ben Gilbert It's not clear what belongs in an Android camp versus a Chrome camp, and Sundar hasn't unified them yet.
- ▶ 3:21:47 Ben Gilbert The whole Chrome and Bing thing was defense against Microsoft, Android was defense against Apple and Microsoft, and Google Plus is now defense against Facebook.
- ▶ 3:29:16 David Rosenthal Chrome's pretty good.
- ▶ 3:37:01 David Rosenthal And with Chrome and with Android, like the core great products, two of these core great products.
- ▶ 3:55:45 David Rosenthal And then my quintessence is, it is wild that this one company has eight products with over a billion users and started this era with just one search that didn't even have a billion users yet, but search, Android, Chrome, YouTube, Gmail,…
- ▶ 3:57:25 Ben Gilbert Chrome.
- ▶ 3:57:28 Ben Gilbert I mean, Google helped Chrome.
- ▶ 3:59:52 Ben Gilbert Chrome.
Google Part I: Origins of Search. How the Best Business in Human History Happened (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:40:41 Ben Gilbert We are not talking Chrome territory here.
Epic Systems (MyChart) · Acquired
- ▶ 3:32:31 Ben Gilbert In the long run, patient safety, by locking down data, the Cures Act makes things like screen scraping or Chrome extensions or RPA legal as a means to extract data from Epic.
- ▶ 3:33:15 Ben Gilbert They're all using some Chrome extension.
Microsoft Volume II: The Complete History and Strategy of the Ballmer Years (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:40:58 Ben Gilbert Chrome wasn't a thing yet.
Super Pumped (with Brian Koppelman and Joseph Gordon-Levitt) · Acquired
- ▶ 5:31 Brandon Millman We started off as a Chrome extension, but more recently released our iOS app at the end of January.
The Browser (with Brendan Eich, Chief Architect of Netscape + Mozilla and CEO of Brave) · Acquired
- ▶ 6:00 Brendan Eich So Brave is a faster browser because it blocks all the trackers, many of which Google or its publishers or ad buyers depend on, and it's based on Chrome, the Chromium open source code.
- ▶ 6:17 Brendan Eich So if you were using Google Chrome, which kind of swept the market up to 70%, let's say, or more of market share, uh, 2.65 billion users, they say,
- ▶ 6:27 Brendan Eich You should get off Chrome and you should use Brave.
- ▶ 27:59 Brendan Eich That was the first browser extension ecosystem way ahead of Chrome's.
- ▶ 31:16 Brendan Eich So they were working on browsers before Chrome, and the browser to work on was Firefox.
- ▶ 34:22 Ben Gilbert Firefox did really, really well and gained a huge market share, and then when Chrome launched, it's been slowly etched away every year by Chrome now, and it's down around something like three percent.
- ▶ 35:12 Brendan Eich Rockmelt was when after Chrome came out and was based on the Chrome fork of WebKit, which wasn't its own thing really then, and tried to add social.
- ▶ 36:37 Brendan Eich And UCWeb grew against Chrome in Indonesia and Bangladesh and India.
- ▶ 36:42 Brendan Eich In some Indian states, it had more share than Chrome.
- ▶ 37:40 Brendan Eich We didn't want to take so much revenue in the, in the deal that it became cheaper for them to do Chrome, so we tried to adjust that, but all we did was defer Chrome maybe a few months, a year at most.
- ▶ 38:09 Brendan Eich And that became the basis for not only what they put in Safari, but for Chrome.
- ▶ 39:13 Brendan Eich Larry sat up and said, wait, we're running a search advertising business, and Chrome isn't tracking our users.
- ▶ 39:45 Brendan Eich And Chrome, if you sign into the browser, which is a separate feature in the upper right corner, using your Google account, then you're tracked for ad targeting.
- ▶ 40:19 Brendan Eich But I used to do talks at conferences, ask how many people were using Chrome, how many people knew this, how many people opted out.
- ▶ 41:08 Brendan Eich When I was thinking about Brave, I realized not only had Mozilla become captured by its search partner and was probably going to die because it couldn't compete, not just on Chrome intrinsic qualities, but on distribution, which really…
- ▶ 41:50 Brendan Eich So Google has to pay to distribute Chrome.
- ▶ 48:30 Brendan Eich They used uBlock Origin on Chrome, and now they're using Brave, and I can't get to them through my usual, you know, media channels and advertising methods.
- ▶ 1:01:38 Brendan Eich Now, the downside of this is we look a lot like Chrome.
- ▶ 1:01:46 Brendan Eich We have our own look for the tabs, but it still looks a little like Chrome.
- ▶ 1:01:50 Brendan Eich It's got Chrome extensions, which can be loaded if they don't use the Google account system I mentioned that's for tracking that we disable.
- ▶ 1:01:56 Brendan Eich But, you know, it's still a little bit too Chromey, and yet I think it's worth it because that helped us get users off Chrome.
- ▶ 1:02:02 Brendan Eich Until we really did that rebasing on the front end of Chrome, we were paying a growing maintenance cost on all this electron forkage, and our users were suffering because it wasn't fully Chrome.
- ▶ 1:02:18 Brendan Eich So we switched to a more complete Chrome fork like a lot of browsers use.
- ▶ 1:05:10 Brendan Eich I mentioned Chrome is alleged to have 2.65 billion users.
- ▶ 1:05:16 Brendan Eich I uninstalled Chrome.
- ▶ 1:11:57 Ben Gilbert Now you're building your own native Brave wallet directly into the browser, which is totally a thing that Safari could do, that Chrome could do, and it doesn't seem like
- ▶ 1:35:07 David Rosenthal Do you think that Facebook or Google or, or any of the others could ship a wallet in Chrome, for instance, or like actually really embrace this?
- ▶ 1:35:17 Brendan Eich I know Google had a wallet or may even have a wallet team that does some outward bound stuff, and they never connected it with Chrome.
- ▶ 1:37:12 Brendan Eich So, you know, we're trying to get people off of Chrome and that's a matter of getting people to see that it's easy to migrate.
- ▶ 1:37:21 Brendan Eich And then you can cut the cord with Chrome.
- ▶ 1:38:10 Brendan Eich If you're taking users from Chrome, we could both take and not really interfere with Joe.