Google Chrome Browser

Google Chrome is a web browser developed by Google that uses the WebKit layout engine. It was first released as a beta version for Microsoft Windows on September 2, 2008, and the public stable release was on December 11, 2008. The name is derived from the graphical user interface frame, or "chrome", of web browsers.  As of December 2011, Chrome is the second most widely used browser, having recently overtaken Mozilla Firefox, with 27.27% worldwide usage share of web browsers and is the most popular browser in South America, according to StatCounter.  In September 2008, Google released a large portion of Chrome's source code, including its V8 JavaScript engine, as an open source project entitled Chromium. 

This move enabled third-party developers to study the underlying source code and to help port the browser to the Mac OS X and Linux operating systems.  Google also expressed hope that other browsers would adopt the V8 JavaScript engine to improve web application performance.  The Google-authored portion of Chromium is released under the permissive BSD license, which allows portions to be incorporated into both open source and closed source software programs.  Other portions of the source code are subject to a variety of open source licenses.   Chromium implements a similar feature set as Chrome, but lacks built-in automatic updates, built-in PDF reader and Google branding, and most noticeably has a blue-colored logo in place of the multicolored Google logo.