11/12/2008
Google's 10th birthday. Google encroaches on Microsoft's territory and the browser market with the launch of the Google Chrome browser. It was released as a beta version for Microsoft Windows on September 2, and as a stable public release on December 11.Eric Schmidt at first opposed the development of an independent web browser. He stated that "at the time, Google was a small company," and he did not want to go through "bruising browser wars." But when Google's co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin hired several Mozilla Firefox developers and built a demo version of Chrome, Schmidt admitted that "It was so good that it essentially forced me to change my mind."
In September 2008, Google released the majority of Chrome's source code as an open-source project called Chromium, on which Chrome releases are still based.