IE may be better than most! At the recent Security Conference all the various Browsers were put through their paces on identical machines (as far as Firewall, AV, etc...) IE performed as good or better than all others. The only bad part about IE is it is the center of the Hackers Bulleye, being a MS product. I mean, who wants to brag that they found a breach in Opera? Hackers work numbers. They want the biggest impact from their efforts. Firefox with all the various plugins that are out there performed the worse, but the difference between the best and worse was really minor. The recommendation came down (for IT managers)to have everyone use the same browser, keep it updated and make sure the rest of your security devices are also properly set up, updated, and working. The biggest culprits to issues are third party add-ons that take over certain settings, such as Site Search Engines. Also, most failures in security came from the user allowing sites to install programs, or the user installing a program to view a site. Software is not the problem, it is the stupid users! P2P is one of the biggest offenders and the Free Real Player has ended up on many IT Dept's Banned Software lists due to its nature and the default settings. (NOTE: If all users using MS IE and OSs turned on Auto Updates and allowed those updates to be installed, about 99% of the current known issues would be dealt with. The problem is too many computers are out there that do not have the latest updates installed. The recommendation from the conference to MS was make the Updates smaller, so users with slow connections would be willing to update the machines.)

ratscloset
aka John