Softpile

Google Chrome is a freeware web browser developed by Google that uses the WebKit layout engine. It was first released as a beta version for Microsoft Windows on September 2, 2008, and the public stable release was on December 11, 2008. As of January 2012, Google Chrome has approximately 25–28% worldwide usage share of web browsers, making it the second or the third most widely used browser, according to different estimates. According to StatCounter, Chrome overtook Firefox in November 2011, and is the most popular browser in India, Pakistan, Russia, and South America. As of March 2012, Chrome is 3.8% of market share away from overtaking Internet Explorer in worldwide market share. Chrome was assembled from 25 different code libraries from Google and third parties such as Mozilla's Netscape Portable Runtime, Network Security Services, NPAPI, as well as SQLite and a number of other open-source projects. The JavaScript virtual machine was considered a sufficiently important project to be split off (as was Adobe/Mozilla's Tamarin) and handled by a separate team in Denmark coordinated by Lars Bak at Aarhus. According to Google, existing implementations were designed "for small programs, where the performance and interactivity of the system weren't that important", but web applications such as Gmail "are using the web browser to the fullest when it comes to DOM manipulations and JavaScript", and therefore would significantly benefit from a JavaScript engine that could work faster.