With more and more people connecting to the Internet through a phone or a tablet instead of a PC, Google Inc. is bringing its fast-growing browser, Chrome, to the newest Android-powered mobile devices.

The launch Tuesday of Chrome for Android Beta caps an engineering effort of more than one year within Google, and marks a convergence between two of the company's fastest-growing products. Both Android and Chrome launched in the third quarter of 2008, and both have had powerful growth spurts, with Android becoming the world's most popular mobile operating system last year and with Chrome on a track that could make it the world's most popular browser later this year.

"This is a big moment for us," said Sundar Pichai, Google's senior vice president for Chrome and applications. "The world is going mobile at a pretty phenomenal rate. Using the Web on a mobile device, I think, is in its early stages, and we think this a big step toward where we're headed."

The analytics firm StatCounter said Monday that the share of Internet visits that came from a smartphone nearly doubled over the past year, to 8.5 percent in January from 4.3 percent a year ago.

Chrome overtook Mozilla's Firefox to become the world's No. 2 browser behind Microsoft's Internet Explorer in November, according to StatCounter, and currently has more than 26 percent of the worldwide browser market and is growing, while Internet Explorer has about 40 percent and is slipping.

Google hopes the convergence of Chrome and Android will drive more smartphone users to try its browser, and will also attract independent software developers to focus more on apps that run on Google's products. And while native apps remain the centerpiece of smartphones and tablets, Google believes that's changing as browsers become ever more powerful under the latest standards of HTML5, the...