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Google Chrome is a freeware web browser developed by Google that uses the WebKit layout engine. It was released as a beta version forMicrosoft Windows on September 2, 2008, and as a stable public release on December 11, 2008. As of September 2012, according to StatCounter, Google Chrome had 34% worldwide usage share of web browsers making it the most widely used web browser.W3Counter indicated that Chrome became the leading browser globally in August 2012 with 28% marketshare. However, Net Applications indicates that Chrome is only third when it comes to the size of its user base, behind Internet Explorer and Firefox.
In September 2008, Google released a large portion of Chrome's source code as an open source project called Chromium,which Chrome releases are still based on.
