Google LLC has celebrated the 10th anniversary of its all-conquering Chrome web browser by launching a new version that has support for phone notches, among other things.

The original version of Google Chrome launched on Sept. 2, 2008, at a time Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer browser dominated the market while the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox held a second-place 26 percent share.

From nothing, Chrome rose through the ranks despite memory management problems for a good portion of its life. By January 2015, Chrome held more than a 50 percent market share after having surpassed Internet Explorer’s market share in 2013.

Notably, Chrome not only competed with IE but destroyed it. The once-dominant browser had just under a 7 percent share of the market as of July this year versus 68 percent for Chrome and 11 percent for Firefox.

The 10th-anniversary version of Chrome comes with a number of design changes and code support tweaks. The latter, unlike Internet Explorer, are W3C standards-compliant.

Leading the list is a visual user experience tweak that sees Chrome embrace more rounded shapes, new icons and a new color palette. Seeming taking cues from Firefox, the visual tweaks in Chrome are claimed to “boost your productivity.”

Google Developer Advocate Pete LePage, the same guy in the video, writes that “take tabs, for instance. Are you a secret tab-hoarder? No judgment. We changed the shape of our tabs so that the website icons are easier to see, which makes it easier to navigate across lots of tabs.”

On mobile, he added, “we’ve made a number of changes to help you browse faster, including moving the toolbar to the bottom on iOS, so it’s easy to reach. And across Chrome, we simplified the prompts, menus, and even the URLs in your address bar.”

On the code side, Chrome 69 now supports CSS Scroll Snap, a CSS feature that allows website designers to create “smooth, slick, scroll experiences”; display cutouts, which is code for notch support, that delivers full-screen support in Chrome for phones with notches; and finally a Web Locks API that allows users to acquire a lock asynchronously, hold it while work is performed, then release it.

Most users won’t notice the changes aside from the aesthetic tweaks. But it’s always a positive to see Google continuing to bring changes to its browser — in this case, its 69th version.

Image: Google