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🎯 How Chrome ate Internet Explorer
Google's market share heist
Read time: 3 minutes 25 seconds
It’s currently 35°, sunny blue skies, with thunderstorms in a couple hours.
Time to hit send, go for a snorkel, then spend all evening clicking and tabbing around a browser.
Vamos,
— Tom
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How Chrome ate Internet Explorer
Chess Move
The what: A TLDR explanation of the strategy
When Google launched Chrome in 2008, Microsoft’s browser Internet Explorer had ~67% market share.
Every new PC came with IE pre-installed.
Every corporate IT department standardised on IE.
Every web developer had to ensure their sites worked on IE first.
For Google, IE’s ubiquitous position was an existential threat. If Microsoft decided to change how IE handled search, or replaced Google as the default engine, Google's core business could evaporate overnight.
But the landscape was evolving.
With the rise of cloud computing, users were increasingly spending more time in web apps than desktop software.
Browsers were becoming the Operating System for the internet.
It was too late for Google to develop a winning mainstream desktop OS, but controlling the browser would let them shape how the modern web evolved.
Over the next 15 years, Google pulled off one of the most dramatic market-share robberies of all time - establishing Chrome as the de facto browser of choice for the modern internet user.
More of an Arc fan myself…
💡 | Strategy Playbook: Platform wars > product wars. |
Breakdown
The how: The strategic playbook boiled down to 3x key takeaways
1. Owned distribution
Microsoft’s distribution advantage for IE was clear - it came free and pre-installed in the bundle of apps on every Windows device.
Google’s distribution opportunity was the 120+ million monthly US visitors to Google.com.
Every time someone visited Google.com via a browser other than Chrome, Google showed a prompt to download Chrome.
Google.com was a channel to promote Chrome to billions; a surface that Microsoft couldn’t control.
Google's homepage was famously minimalist - just a logo, search box, and two buttons.
When they added a third floating element, suggesting Chrome to users, it stood out.
2. Ecosystem moat
Besides Search, Google had a suite of other popular properties that they leveraged to incentivise Chrome downloads:
YouTube recommended Chrome for “better video playback”
Gmail showed warnings about IE compatibilities issues
Google Docs added offline mode, but only in Chrome
Android phones came with Chrome pre-installed
The more Google services someone used, the more valuable Chrome became.
But the masterstroke was Chrome’s sign-in feature (honestly deserves its own full breakdown 👀).
In short, by linking Chrome to Google accounts, they:
Synchronised bookmarks, passwords, preferences, and history across devices
Made Chrome feel “personalised” in comparison to IE’s one-size-fits-all experience
Created switching costs that increased with usage
Not to mention, more data from tracking users around the web meant better ad targeting (and subsequently more Search revenue).
3. Speed as a wedge
Google’s core Search business relies on users quickly landing on relevant pages.
Internal experiments found that introducing a 0.5 second delay to the results page caused a 20% decrease in revenue and repeat traffic.
Internet Explorer, comfortable in its dominance, had no incentive to optimise for speed. Pages loaded... eventually.
Meanwhile, Microsoft’s lack of innovation was costing Google a fortune.
Chrome attacked this complacency with 3 technical innovations:
Independent tabs: Each tab ran as a separate process, preventing one slow page from freezing the entire browser.
V8: A ground-up JavaScript engine that ran web applications up to 10x faster.
DNS pre-fetching: Chrome would predict which links users might click and pre-load them in the background.
Before long, Chrome was measurably faster than IE in every benchmark. But Google didn't stop there - they turned speed into an industry-wide mission:
Released the Chromium source code, forcing other browsers to keep up.
Created tools like PageSpeed Insights, making site speed metrics public.
Added site speed as a Google search ranking factor, incentivising the entire web to optimise for speed if they want Google to send them traffic.
Chrome became synonymous with "fast", while IE became the browser you used to download Chrome.
Rabbit Hole
The where: 3x high-signal resources to learn more
[1 minute read]
Despite being one of Apple's primary competitors, Google is the default search engine on Safari, iOS, and MacOS.
But there’s a catch: Each year they pay Apple over $20 billion.
It's the single biggest payment Google makes to anyone... for anything.
And it accounts for 20% of Apple’s annual profits.
[5 minute read]
Today’s internet hall-of-fame interactive marketing campaign.
“In early-mid 2008, I created a comic book for Google explaining the inner workings of their new open source browser Google Chrome.
Google's mailroom accidentally shipped some copies on September 1st -- about two days before the scheduled launch -- so for a little over a day, the comic was all anyone could see of the browser! It was quite a rollercoaster.” — Scott McCloud, webcomic pioneer.
[2 minute read]
Chrome’s official launch post on the Google Blog.
By Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management. This guy’s got potential.
That’s all for today’s breakdown - time to close my browser and get some fresh air.
— Tom
P.S. Listening to this playlist whilst writing today’s post. Purpose-built for my fellow breakbeat and jungle heads 🎧
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