The number of people in Britain using the internet has grown by almost a fifth in the past 12 months and people are spending more time online than ever before, according to figures released yesterday.

Britain's internet population increased from 7.8m in October to 9.2m in March, web tracking group MMXI Europe said. The average time spent online increased from 257 to 276 minutes a month, though that number could expect to rise sharply when the unmetered access deals now being offered start to feature in the figures.

The research also details the most popular websites in Britain, led by Yahoo.com which had 3.15m unique visitors in March, followed by MSN.com with 3.05m and Freeserve with 2.96m visits.

BBC.co.uk is ranked eighth with 1.69m unique users during the month.

Yahoo is the second most popular site in Europe's other two largest markets, France and Germany, where two locally-produced portals are the most visited. In France Wanadoo has the highest number of unique visitors and in Germany the chart is topped by T-Online which had 5.94m visitors in March.

Despite the growth in new internet users, the ratio of men to women online in Britain has remained disproportionate. Men continue to make up the majority of web users with 52.4% of the internet population made up of adult males, 34.8% adult women and 12.8% children under the age of 14.

The figures also dispel the myth that the internet is purely for people under the age of 35. While the largest user group is between 25-34 at around 24%, some 21% are aged 35-44 and "silver surfers" over the age of 55 account for more than 10%.