Google's Chrome browser has had rather a good year. According to bean counters at Net Applications the fledgling browser has 10 per cent of the market having made gains at the expense of Redmond's Internet Exploder.

The figures do have some good news for Microsoft. It seems that IE9, which embodies Microsoft's dream to build a cutting-edge browser, is showing signs of real adoption with usage that grew from 0.4 percent in November to 0.5 percent in December.

For months now, Chrome has been on the rise. It jumped from 9.3 percent in November statistics to 10 percent in December. Mozilla's Firefox, the second-place browser, stayed flat at about 22.8 percent, Apple's Safari rose from 5.6 percent to 5.9 percent, and Opera was flat at about 2.2 percent.

Chrome and Safari grew at the expense of IE, which dropped from 58.4 percent to 57.1 percent.