14 DAY TRIAL // Google Chrome is now celebrating its third birthday. It's come a long way in just three years, it's at version 13 now, though the number is largely meaningless for Chrome, and it has a fairly decent slice of the market.
It certainly revitalized the browser market and spurred everyone to move faster or get left behind, IE 9 adopted HTML5, a new Firefox is coming every six weeks now.
For its birthday though, the Chrome team spends less time talking about the browser itself and has actually created a very interesting visualization of the evolution of the web, all of the major browsers on the one hand, and all of the major technologies on the other.
All major browsers get a visual timeline, with screenshots of major versions. It's quite a shock to see what the early Netscape or Opera looked like, compared to today.
In fact, even if you look at the browsers in the early 2000's, you'll probably understand why Internet Explorer was dominating like it did.
Then Firefox came along, from the ashes of Netscape and with the care of Mozilla, and pushed things forward.
Microsoft was finally forced to start improving Internet Explorer once again, which it's done with each iteration, IE 7, IE 8 and especially the latest IE 9.
The second big revolution in the browser market was Chrome though. After Firefox got things moving, Chrome kicked them into fifth gear.
Firefox fans may be reluctant to admit it, but Firefox 4, the biggest move forward in Firefox history, has Chrome to thank for many of its new features and design.
The rapid release cycle Mozilla implemented is also molded after Chrome's own development cycle. Then again, considering that many die-hard fans don't like the fact that a new Firefox is coming every six weeks, perhaps they shouldn't be that thankful to Google.
