Lauren Goode

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Google Chrome: 750 Million Active Users, Synchronized Web and Mobile Browsing

Chrome, Google’s homegrown Web browser, has seen a pretty big uptick in users in recent months. And, increasingly, those users are coming from mobile.

That was the gist of the Chrome-focused presentation given by Sundar Pichai, Google’s senior vice president for Chrome and Android, and Linus Upson, vice president of engineering at Chrome,at the Google I/O conference earlier today.

Pichai announced that Chrome now claims more than 750 million monthly active users, with 300 million new users since last month the last I/O conference a year ago. (Google used to measure browser users on a weekly basis, but has since adjusted this to reflect industry standards.)

Pichai and Upson didn’t say exactly how many of those users are coming from mobile, except to say that, not surprisingly, that segment is growing. In an effort to nudge the browsing experience forward in a “multiscreen world,” Upson showed how a Chrome Web browser will mimic the experience as you’re running game applications from an Android tablet (Nexus 10, natch).

So the user starts a race or performs a function on a touchscreen Android tablet, and the same action will occur in the game on his or her desktop browser.

They also demoed Racer, a multiplayer Chrome experiment that uses Chrome across up to five devices at once.

Chrome mobile, Upson said, has been getting speedier, with performance improving by “more than 50 percent” on mobile, compared with 25 percent speedier on desktop.

Google’s browser, of course, serves as the foundation for Chrome OS, a computer system based solely on the Web — i.e., the $1,300 Chromebook Pixel — but Google only said that there would be “more to talk about” later this year in regards to Chrome OS.

Chrome has previously claimed the top-browser-in-the-world title, according to third-party analytics firm StatCounter, but other reports indicate that Internet Explorer is still the dominant Web browser in many parts of the world.

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