Pichai Prepares to Tout Chrome

Pichai, who said Chrome OS notebooks are on time for the summer, prepares to tout Chrome browser metrics.

Google’s Chrome browser now has 160 million users, up from 120 million through December and more than double the 70 million Pichai quoted at Google I/O last year. The browser has serious momentum.

Google in Chrome 11 introduced a speech-to-text feature. Here he speaks into the Chrome browser and Google Translate translates his spoken command from English into Chinese.

Pichai noted Chrome performance has been accelerated at an impressive clip. Here is the JavaScript speed bar chart, tracking performance speed from its launch in September 2008 to the last stable edition, Chrome 11.

These digital fish have been accelerated by GPI acceleration in Chrome. After showing various speed bumps, Google showed an amazing 10,000 fish swimming 30 frames per second, thanks to the Canvas 2D technology. In this shot, Mozilla runs Google’s Chrome fish experiment in WebGL, the Web-based graphics library.

Google is introducing in-application payments in the Chrome Web Store, which is now available in 41 languages around the world and has seen 17 million app downloads since its launch late last year. Users can buy things within an application with just two clicks.

Moreover, Google has enabled in-app payment so that developers only need one line of code to add the capability.

Pichai said Google is only charging developers a 5 percent fee for in-app payments, compared to the industry standard of 30 percent. This should make it quite attractive to developers.

Peter Vesterbacka, the Mighty Eagle behind Rovio Mobile’s Angry Birds, pops up on the stage. The crowd buzzed in anticipation.

Yes, Angry Birds meets Chrome. Rovio’s first Angry Birds Web app is going Chrome, based on the WebGL graphics spec. “On most modern PCs, we get 60 frames per second, easy,” Vesterbacka said.

Yes, this is a special version of Angry Birds with plenty of Chrome decorations. Includes Chrome clouds, flowers and rocks, as well as Chrome bombs to help the Angry Birds blow up the egg-stealing pigs. Moreover, Vesterbacka said he used local storage to allow users to play the game entirely offline.