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.

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.”

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.

Editors' Recommendations

Julian Chokkattu
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Julian is the mobile and wearables editor at Digital Trends, covering smartphones, fitness trackers, smartwatches, and more…
I found a Chrome extension that makes web browsing bearable again
Google Drive in Chrome on a MacBook.

GDPR cookie consent notices were meant to hand privacy control back to ordinary internet denizens. Instead, they’ve unleashed a tidal wave of deception, with unscrupulous website owners using any means necessary to trick you into letting them harvest your private data for resale and profit.

It wasn’t meant to be like this. But while things might have not gone so well for GDPR, there’s still a way to protect your privacy and banish those annoying pop-ups in one fell swoop. Instead of rage-clicking Accept just to get the damned pop-ups to go away, I’ve found a much better way: the Consent-O-Matic browser extension.

Read more
Google Chrome is getting a complete overhaul for its birthday
Screenshot of Google Chrome with updated Material You design language.

To mark the 15th anniversary of its popular web browser, Google is releasing a brand new update for Chrome. The biggest change will be a redesign for the browser that will now adhere to Google’s Material You design language. There is also an update for the Chrome Web Store, alongside enhanced search features and some tweaks to Safe Browsing.

Material You is Google's unified design language, which was first introduced with Android 12. According to a blog post shared by Chrome Vice President Parisa Tabriz, Chrome will be the latest product from the company that will be getting a design overhaul featuring new icons that place a strong emphasis on legibility. On top of that, there will be fresh color palettes that will expand to the tabs and toolbar.

Read more
This Google Chrome feature may save you from malware
Google Chrome app on s8 screen.

There are probably hundreds of thousands of Google Chrome extensions out there, and with so many options to choose from, it can be hard to know whether the plugin you want to install is hiding malware nasties.

That could become a thing of the past, though, as Google is testing a feature that will warn you if an extension you installed has been removed from its Chrome Web Store.

Read more