Opera Software has announced that it has crossed the 300 million monthly user milestone across all of the company’s web browser products on mobile phones, tablets, TV set top boxes as well as PCs.

Lars Boilesen, CEO of Opera Software said that 300 million monthly users marks a significant achievement, adding that the Norwegian software company experienced the fastest acceleration in user growth leading up to this milestone.

Boilesen also used this opportunity to announce details surrounding Opera Software’s strategy to claim a bigger piece of the smartphone browser market pie, a segment currently led by Apple’s Safari browser and Google’s Android browser.

The shift to WebKit and Chromium

In order to deliver an enhanced browser on Android-powered mobile devices as well as iOS-running smartphones, tablets and music players, Opera will make a gradual transition to the WebKit engine and Chromium, for most of the upcoming versions of browsers for smartphones and computers.

“The WebKit engine is already very good, and we aim to take part in making it even better. It supports the standards we care about, and it has the performance we need,” explained Opera Software CTO, Håkon Wium Lie. “It makes more sense to have our experts working with the open source communities to further improve WebKit and Chromium, rather than developing our own rendering engine further. Opera will contribute to the WebKit and Chromium projects, and we have already submitted our first set of patches: to improve multi-column layout.”

During the forthcoming 2013 Mobile World Congress, Opera Software will preview its upcoming browser for Android-operating devices, which is the first product resulting from this shift to WebKit.

“The shift to WebKit means more of our resources can be dedicated to developing new features and the user-friendly solutions that can be expected from a company that invented so many of the features that are today being used by everyone in the browser industry,” Lie explained.

In related news, the latest (January 2013) mobile browser stats from market analytics company Net Applications recently revealed that Opera Mini’s global usage rose slightly to 9.84% currently, with Opera Mobile snapping up another 0.62% market share for the company.