Google Chrome avoids both these issues through a technique known as sandboxing. Both Internet Explorer and Firefox have notorious problems for some users: security risks and pop-up hell with the former, and frequent memory problems leading to freezes and crashes for the latter. That might seem an obvious thing to say, but sadly it's not always true of other browsers. Why the growth? Well, simply put it just works.

The number of people using Google's Chrome browser has almost doubled in the past year, and most analysts expect it to take over from Firefox as the lead challenger to Internet Explorer sometime in 2012.