According to data from StatCounter via Phandroid, in addition to becoming the most dominant mobile device in the world, Google has now overtaken Opera to become the most popular mobile web browser as well, over the last year (February 2011 – February 2012).

Figures from the online measurement service show that February saw use of Android’s Robot browser overtake Opera to take the top spot for the first time.

The chart below, which plots the use of mobile Internet browsers over the last twelve months, indicates significant growth from Android which had only just overtaken BlackBerry to fourth place one year ago.

Opera, which is particularly popular in both Asia and Africa, now sits in second place having been overtaken by Android and the firm will look to increase its share with the newly released developer beta version of its Opera Mini Browser that aims to provide users with a more advanced and social mobile Web experience. Although the Scandinavian company does not own its own devices like Google, its popularity comes from it being preloaded onto other firm’s feature phones like Samsung.

StatCounter breaks out usage of the iPhone and iPod Touch, which might otherwise see Apple’s browser rank first. However, considering the advantage that Android has over Apple with more than 300 million Android devices world wide, an increase of of 250%, the fact that the iPhone ranks so closely shows that its users are proportionally more likely to browse the Web than Android owners.

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Google‘s own Chrome browser has had incredible growth in 3 short years. After being announced in December 2008, the lean and mean browser has taken the web by storm, and has now officially overtaken Mozilla’s open-source Firefox browser.

Chrome now has 25.55% of the web browser market compared to Firefox‘s 25.42%. That is hardly any growth, but what makes this significant is that Firefox has actually started declining in market share, where it once held 30% of the market. Internet Explorer is also continuing to lose market share, and this week it fell below 40% for the first time. This is probably due to users of old machines finally upgrading from Internet Explorer 6, but instead of upgrading to IE8 or 9, going directly to another browser like Chrome. And any self-respecting “tech-guru” will tell their luddite friends to switch to another browser, which updates itself and leads to less maintenance.

But it looks like South Africa is a little behind worldwide trends for browser usage – Internet Explorer has taken a very recent up-tick in usage, and Firefox has only steadily been declining over the last few months. Google Chrome is clearly growing the fastest, and it looks like it will overtake Firefox within the next 90 days: (click graph to enlarge)

The question is now how quickly Google Chrome will be neck in neck with Internet Explorer in worldwide traffic. At the current pace of growth, it looks like 2012 might be the year Google Chrome becomes the most popular browser on Earth.