Google Chrome is the web browser that Google launched back in 2008. A browser that became really popular in a very short time due to its browsing speed and its clean and minimalist interface.
Chrome currently has around 900 million users, and depending on the source we consult, for many it is considered the most used web browser on the Internet, ahead of other browsers such as Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Opera or Safari.
Where does the name “Chrome” come from?
The word “Chrome” means ” chrome ” in English, or what is the same, a silvery-white, hard and brittle metal widely used in the metallurgy industry.
Chromium has various applications and is used in alloys to create stainless steel, in chrome paints as an anti-oxidant treatment and for many other functions. But what does all this have to do with the Google browser?
The origin of the name is a reference to the design of the browser
The name “Chrome” was assigned by those responsible for developing Google’s browser in the late 2000s, and refers to the actual chrome that can be found on classic American muscle cars from the 1960s and 1970s.
Essentially, the term “muscle car” is about cramming a giant engine into a smaller car, and that’s precisely what Google’s developers were looking for: a browser with a lot of power and few frills.
In this way, in the same way that the chrome moldings and bumpers of classic cars embellish the body of the vehicle, the developers used the term “chome” to refer to everything that was not the web page that was being displayed on the screen.
In other words, the chrome in this case was everything that “decorated” the browser, such as the toolbar, the address bar, the bookmarks, etc.
At first “Chrome” was just the code name used by developers internally. In fact, they even held a small contest among the project workers to choose the official name, but the suggested names were so bad that in the end they decided to keep the provisional name.
According to Google developer Glen Murphy, the head of the project insisted that people already associated the word “chrome” with speed and fast, shiny cars, so it was the perfect name for the browser.
First version of the Chrome browser. | Image: Bingo Cat
A name that also has an ironic touch
Finally, we cannot ignore that the name also has a great humorous component .
Especially if we take into account that Chrome is a minimalist browser, something that is still noticeable today, but that in 2008 drew a lot of attention due to its absence of frames, buttons and menus.
Therefore, there are not many places where we can find those chromatic decorations that refer to the name of the browser. As explained by Sundar Pichai in a 2015 interview with The New York Times :
“There is a reason why we created Chrome. We minimized everything related to Chrome so that the user spent all their time inside the website they wanted to visit. We wanted users to focus on the content they were using. The reason the product was called “Chrome” was because we wanted to minimize the browser chrome. That’s how we think about it.”
