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Despite charges that Google has dragged its feet in promoting Chrome, there are signs that it can wrest market share from IE and advance overall innovation in browsers.

After one year in existence, Google's open-source browser has only 2.84 percent market share, while Microsoft's Internet Explorer has 66.97 percent and Mozilla Firefox (also open source) has 22.98 percent share and growing, according to NetApplications. Those numbers have caused many analysts to question whether Google has done enough to market its browser. The questions echo earlier concerns that many people had about whether Google was doing enough to promote its Android mobile operating system. Since those concerns were aired, though, the OS has shown signs of much more momentum, with almost 20 Android handsets due by the end of the year. There are some good reasons to believe that Chrome is about to do a similar zero-to-60 acceleration, and the three biggest ones are the company's newfound willingness to spend money on high-profile deals with hardware makers; viable versions of Chrome for the Mac and Linux; and an upcoming open ecosystem of extensions for the browser.