I was disappointed the only IE competitor mentioned was Firefox. Opera, Safari, and Netscape are well known enough that it would behoove a more balanced view to mention them as well.

My only use of IE lately is replicating a user problem I can’t replicate in Firefox and the very, very infrequent case a web site site doesn’t work in Firefox or Netscape. 🙁 Quite frankly, it scares me to surf with IE. Of course, I am the person my friends call about cleaning up their computer when it runs slow because it is a computer virus, spyware, and adware infested mess. So my fears are based on the horror of cleaning up the after effects of using IE.

Internet Explorer Unsafe for 284 Days in 2006 – Security Fix

For a total 284 days in 2006 (or more than nine months out of the year), exploit code for known, unpatched critical flaws in pre-IE7 versions of the browser was publicly available on the Internet. Likewise, there were at least 98 days last year in which no software fixes from Microsoft were available to fix IE flaws that criminals were actively using to steal personal and financial data from users.

In a total of ten cases last year, instructions detailing how to leverage “critical” vulnerabilities in IE were published online before Microsoft had a patch to fix them.

Microsoft labels software vulnerabilities “critical” — its most severe rating — if the flaws could be exploited to criminal advantage
without any action on the part of the user, or by merely convincing an IE user to click on a link, visit a malicious Web site, or open a
specially crafted e-mail or e-mail attachment.

The small mention of competitors:

In contrast, Internet Explorer’s closest competitor in terms of market share — Mozilla’s Firefox browser — experienced a single period lasting just nine days last year in which exploit code for a serious security hole was posted online before Mozilla shipped a patch to remedy the problem.

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