Wired magazine has a history of Google Chrome written by authors with inside access to key managers and developers in the project. The article tells the best story of all histories that I have seen on the web. Read it in full as well as take a look at the infographic that chronicles the rise and fall of browsers prior to Chrome. I have extracted a timeline from the article to whet your appetite:

• 2001: a gleam in the parents’ eye. Larry Page and Sergey Brin discuss with Eric Schmidt, newly recruited to Google, the idea of a Google browser. Schmidt turns it down
• A Firefox group is eventually set up, to work on extensions to Firefox and incidentally acquire the expertise to develop their own browser
• Around June 2006, Ben Goodger, Darin Fisher, and Brian Ryner devise a prototype running on WebKit, and the sad icon logo for a crashed tab is already part of the protoype
• September 2006: Lars Bak is hired to develop the JavaScript engive dubbed V8.
• By autumn 2006: the green light has been given to work on the browser as a formal project. Certain conditions apply: the browser must be radically different than FF and IE, and must be open source.
• May 2007, Google acquires GreenBorder Technologies, a software firm writing programs to isolate IE and Firefox activities into virtual sessions, a contributor to the multi-processor design of Chrome
• The project runs in total secrecy even inside the company. Mid-2007: other Google employees are allowed to see the project.

The project manages to remain under wraps until the slightly-premature leak of Scott McCloud’s comic on September 1, 2008 by Philipp Lenssen and the formal launch on September 2.