The question of using 3rd party cookies — and many other web-related issues — revolves around Google's flagship product, the Google Chrome browser. It’s hard to believe, but at the beginning of 2009, 90% of the market was dominated by Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, with Microsoft's browser holding around 65%.
It took less than a year for the newcomer Google Chrome, which was based on WebKit, to gain a whopping 30 million users. And in just four years, it managed to dethrone IE and become the most popular browser in the world. Several key factors contributed to this:
1. Chrome started by separating tabs into individual processes, making all interactions with the operating system multi-threaded, increasing cache sizes, and making the browser more efficient.
2. Google immediately focused on developers. As early as 2008, all source code was made open-source (while Microsoft kept everything secret), and in 2010 the extension store was launched, which was a global breakthrough in the industry.
3. Aggressive marketing helped as well. Google leveraged its main search engine (who would have doubted?), online, and TV advertising.
Users wanted a lighter and faster browser, and they got it. Competitors were slow to react — Edge (the successor to IE) added extensions support only in 2015. By then, Chrome had become the de facto standard for web development. And in December 2018, Microsoft waved the white flag, deciding to transition Edge to the Chromium engine.
Now, Google Chrome holds 65% of the market, making it one of the company's most successful products, in my opinion. But, as we know, monopolies come with their own costs. Daniel Glazman mentioned this as early as 2012, noting that browser dominance leads developers to neglect compatibility concerns.
It will be fascinating to watch the battle between Google Chrome and Safari, Opera, Brave (and maybe even Tor?).
Which browser did you use in your younger days?
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