Yandex Creates its Own Chrome Browser
Posted on 05. Apr, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey in News
If you have never heard of Yandex outside of Russia, it would not be a surprise. However, it is the most popular search engine in Russia and prior to the global financial meltdown, they had been planning to have a blockbuster IPO in the United States on the Nasdaq exchange. Although the current search statistics for Russia is hard to find, Crunchbase reports that Yandex had a 55% share in 2008. According to Alexa, Yandex is currently ranked as the number 26 site in the world.
Yandex has its own mail service, financial portal and advertising model. So it’s no surprise that they have their own browser. And not just any browser. They have decided that Google’s strategy is such a smart one that they have taken a version of the Chrome browser and made it their own.
The “Chrome for Yandex” browser is based off of the Chromium open source build and has the Yandex search page as the home default, as well as other Yandex service such as mail, maps and shopping set as bookmarks. Not a bad idea for a company that competes with Google on its home turf. Why not take a browser that is open source, add in some customizations and allow users to download it?
We’ve seen a few custom Chromium browser builds such as the security focused Comodo browser, but this is probably the smartest commercial iteration yet available. There will surely be more, and it will be exciting to see what creative developers will be able to do with the Chromium builds that are readily available to be tweaked.
Get your Yandex Chrome browser at http://chrome.yandex.ru/.
