Happy Birthday, Chrome

How to unlock Happy Birthday, Chrome in Cheevos, browse in Chrome on September 2nd, its official launch anniversary. Worth 50 XP.

The story

Partner. September 2nd. Chrome's birthday. You were there, browsing, on the actual day.

Cache remembers when Chrome arrived. September 2, 2008. A new browser from a search company, built around one very specific promise: speed. Chrome shipped with its own JavaScript engine and its own process model, at a moment when browsers had started to feel heavy and slow. Google even released a full comic book on launch day explaining the engineering decisions behind it, which is a strange and specific thing to do for a piece of software, and Cache has a copy.

His feelings about Chrome are complicated, and he will say so directly. It changed a lot of things about how browsers competed with each other. Not all of those changes were good. Some of them were very good. Speed became the baseline expectation for every browser that came after, including the one Cheevos was originally built around.

Complicated feelings aside, a birthday is a birthday. You were browsing on the actual anniversary, and Cache logs anniversaries no matter how he feels about the subject.

The catalog entry

CHROME BIRTHDAY (SEPTEMBER 2) Acquired: Used Chrome on September 2nd, the anniversary of Chrome's launch. Condition: Festive. Probably. Rarity: Annual. Cache's Notes: September 2, 2008. Chrome 1.0. Cache remembers when it arrived. It changed a lot of things. Not all of them were good. Some of them were very good. Happy birthday to the browser that made speed the standard expectation. Cache's feelings about Chrome are complicated. He logged this. Obviously.

Spoiler: how to unlock it

This one only requires being in the right browser on the right day.

  1. Open Chrome on September 2nd, in your local time zone.
  2. Browse normally. Visit any page.
  3. The achievement unlocks automatically for browsing on that date.

Google released Chrome's first stable build on September 2, 2008, for Windows, with Mac and Linux versions following later. Its debut was notable for shipping with the V8 JavaScript engine and a multi-process architecture, where each tab ran in its own process, meaning a crash in one tab was far less likely to take down the whole browser. That architecture, unusual at the time, went on to become the standard approach most major browsers use today.

Where it fits in the Stash

The Chrome section of the Stash gets one new annual entry every year on this date, filed right alongside the dinosaur and everything else Cache has kept about the browser he has complicated feelings for. For the raccoon's full take, read the story.