Rui CarmoThis page used to cover Chrome alone, but I decided to start keeping track of Chrome OS and Chromebook resources as well. Depending on how Android support works, some resources on that may pop up here too.
Resources
| Date | Link | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 2008-09-03 00:00:00 +0000 UTC | Portable Chrome 0.2.151.0 | Neat, and done by a guy with sense of humor. |
| Introductory comic | Cute. | |
| The story behind Google Chrome | A pretty decent background summary, listing acquisitions, IP and staff involved. | |
| 2016-05-22 00:00:00 +0000 UTC | Chromium OS for Single-Board Computers | Includes pre-built images for the Raspberry Pi 3 (without Wi-Fi at this point) |
| CloudReady | A third-party Chromium OS distribution with commercial support. | |
| 2026-04-09 00:00:00 +0000 UTC | Orange Juice | A polished Hacker News browser extension for Chrome and Firefox with inline replies, unread highlighting and keyboard navigation |
The Legend
Upon its launch, Chrome caused major upheaval in the blogosphere, with pundits squaring off into four camps:
- The skeptics (mostly Mac users, actually, who have been using WebKit for ages and weren’t too keen on being left out of the beta but still rushed out to run it inside a VM)
- The Microsoft bashers, who saw it as yet another sign of its impending demise, etc., etc.
- The Firefox crusaders, who were caught unawares blinking into the headlights, but who went on about having extensions.
- The “web platform” pundits, who started taking turns to welcome it as the herald of an entirely web-based future.
On all camps, there was also a smattering of UI nerds who alternatively complained and drooled over the simplified interface.
Eight years later, in 2016, it overthrew Internet Explorer as the most popular browser, is a foundational piece of Google’s strategy, and despite being a technology powerhouse, has become somewhat bloated (to the extent where Firefox is a much nicer alternative on lower-specced hardware).