Skip to main content

Google Chrome hits 1 billion monthly active mobile users

google chrome 50th update 50
Image used with permission by copyright holder
Google released its 50th Chrome update, and to celebrate the browser’s milestone, the search giant published an infographic detailing some statistics about the nearly 8-year-old web browser — notably that it has passed 1 billion monthly active mobile users.Chrome50thRelease

The Mountain View company is mum on how those numbers break down between the Android and iOS, but we know it hit 800 million active mobile users in November, according to VentureBeat — that’s an additional 200 million users in just five months, which is impressive.

Recommended Videos

Google Chrome was released in 2008, and Rahul Roy-Chowdhury, product lead for Chrome, says the browser’s mission has stayed the same — to offer a “fast, simple, and secure browser.”

Please enable Javascript to view this content

The stats aren’t limited to mobile news though, Google says Chrome loads 771 billion pages every month. Thanks to search autocomplete, the browser also saves us from writing 500 billion characters per month. That’s more than 186,528 years of typing, based on the average speed of 30 words per minute. Chrome’s data-saving features also saves more than 2 million gigabytes.

Google Chrome allows you to store your log in credentials for all the websites you visit, and the company reports that 9.1 billion forms and passwords are automatically filled each month “to save you from repeating yourself over and over and over again.”

Also, more than 3.6 billion pages are automatically translated each month. And Google has shelled out more than $2.5 million in rewards for the security research community for helping them find and squash bugs. All that top-notch security has protected users 145 million times from malicious web pages.

What’s in the latest version of Chrome, you ask? Just the usual improvements and bug fixes — which you can find more information on here.

Julian Chokkattu
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Julian is the mobile and wearables editor at Digital Trends, covering smartphones, fitness trackers, smartwatches, and more…
Microsoft is, once again, trying to force users into using Edge
Microsoft Edge on a laptop on a couch.

Microsoft has deployed no shortage of tactics to get Windows users onto its Edge browser, and although some of the more nefarious methods of trying to force users to pick up the browser have failed, the company is still experimenting with new methods. The latest route launches Edge automatically on your PC on startup and prompts users to continually import data from Chrome, including your history, bookmarks, and tabs.

Richard Lawler from The Verge spotted the prompt, which showed up earlier this year without explanation before disappearing. It's back now, and in an official capacity from Microsoft. "This is a notification giving people the choice to import data from other browsers," said Microsoft's Caitlin Roulston in a statement to The Verge.

Read more
Google Gemini is about to get a big upgrade for iPhone users
Person holding a phone with Google Gemini Live being shown.

Google Gemini, launched earlier this year for Android and iOS devices, has up until now only been available as a standalone app for Android users. In contrast, Apple users have had to access Google Gemini through the Google app. However, this situation is about to change.

As noted by 9to5Mac, at least one Apple user in the Philippines has been able to download the Google Gemini app from the App Store. However, it hasn’t appeared in other App Stores worldwide, including in the U.S.

Read more
ChatGPT monthly usage may now rival Google Chrome
A person sits in front of a laptop. On the laptop screen is the home page for OpenAI's ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot.

A number of popular generative AI platforms are seeing consistent growth as users are figuring out how they want to use the tools -- and ChatGPT is at the top of the list with the most visits, at 3.7 billion worldwide. So many people are visiting the AI chatbot, and its figures are rivaling browser market share. It can only be compared to Google Chrome figures in terms of monthly users, which is estimated to be around 3.45 billion.

Statistics from Similarweb indicate that ChatGPT saw a 17.2% month-over-month (MoM) growth and a 115.9% year-over-year (YoY) traffic growth. Some highlights that spurned the ChatGPT growth during 2024 include its parent company, OpenAI, updating its web address from a subdomain, chat.openai.com, to a main domain, chatgpt.com. The tool especially saw a surge of traffic in May 2024, when it hit a 2.2-billion-visit milestone, and has been growing ever since, according to Similarweb researcher David F. Carr.

Read more