Google’s Chrome browser is now being used by 120 million people on a daily basis, which is up from 70 million the last time the company disclosed internal usage numbers last May. The new figures were disclosed moments ago at Google’s Chrome event, which Jason is covering live.

The Chrome browser has been seeing big jumps in market share recently, currently taking the No. 3 spot with a 9.26 percent overall share according to Net Applications. On TechCrunch, it is now the top browser used among our readers.

Chrome product manager Sundar Pichai also announced today Google will be making the Chrome browser even faster with an enhancement called “Crankshaft.” He claims:

“When Chrome was first announced two years ago, its new javascript engine, V8, was 8x faster than the fastest existing engine. And it was 16x faster than IE. We’ve continued to improve, and today we are announcing an enchancement called Crankshaft. This makes the engine up to 2x faster than it is today depending on the benchmark. It’s 50x as fast as the fastest web browsers 2 years ago and 100x faster than IE was two years ago.”

It is curious that he is comparing Chrome to IE from two years ago. IE itself, specifically IE9, is also much faster than IE from two years ago. What he really should be comparing it to is the current version of Internet Explorer, IE9. I sense another browser marketing battle beginning. Your move, Microsoft.