Mrs Duck et. al.
using Chrome as it did seem a lot faster than IE but it crashes so often that I have abandonned

I've run into fairly frequent crashes in newer versions of IE, but there is a checkbox in IE setup to "use autorecover" that usually is set by default. The message that says "Internet Explorer has encountered an error and will be closed" pops up fairly often, but when it closes it immediately reopens with all the tabs (pages) you had open returned just as they were - if the autorecover box is checked. Usually even the link that caused the error also opens normally when the recovery happens.

The crashes themselves seem to be caused mostly by "linked in" ads that either don't open or that send back an error message, nearly always "called by Java scripts" in the main page you're looking at. Due to malware problems, both Microsoft and Apple have changed how they handle Java (several times), and sometimes have just turned it off by default (although letting you turn it back on if you figure out that you must have it) and some of the browsers have done similar things with the Java add-ins.

There also are lots of "badly written" Java calls embedded all over the web. And since the "latest html standard" that lots of web designers are using isn't a standard (and won't be for at least a couple of years) many web pages contain html that's unproven and "differently reliable" and may affect different browsers differently. Since all the browsers update frequently, which one does best this week may not be the best next week - or next Tuesday but not on Friday - unless there's a Monday in between and it doesn't rain in Cleveland. (In other words, you've got to use what works for you now, until it doesn't, and then try another one when/if you feel the need to.)

John