After reading this article. I feel bad for anyone hoping to get new functionality in IE (yes there are still people who use it, and maybe someone here has no choice like at work). According to the article IE will stay the same until Longhorn is released sometime in 2006.

The upside is that FireFox fans grow daily, and there isn't going to be anything new to keep them clinging to IE for over a year.

I have managed to convince everybody around me that using IE is the best way to get spyware, viruses and so on.

Everybody agrees now (esp. after seeing the effects of a virus attack). More people in interested in moving away from IE in particular and Windows in general.

I think that FireFox is set to become the biggest browser ever in the next couple of years. Microsoft have lost credibility very badly and are unlikely to recover from the body blow of all those security holes in their OSes and web browsers.

Now once IE loses steam in the market, I hope more webmasters will show interest in making their sites compliant to W3C standards and not just Microsoft's proprietary IE standards.

And if they change it it'll only be for their newest licenses. Upgrade or die :/ not a good way to keep customers imo.

I think they are planning to hold off uprgrading/dating their browser until Longhorn ships - then Longhorn customers will get to see the new and wonderful IE. About a day later, the first exploit will be posted

Frankly, after making their customers wait so long, IE7 had better blow Firefox, Opera and the other alternatives out of the water. If it's just IE6 with a couple of tweaks (tabbed browsing anyone?), they will be unable to tear the alternatives out of their customer's hands.

I have been trying to get most of my customers to use firefox and the majority seem to agree that it's a good browser. I build and sell PC's and there is nothing so annoying as someone telling you that there is something wrong with their PC, you go take a look at it and find that it's all coz of IE, even if the customers are running antivirus software and firewalls.

I think my worst PC repair experience was having to reformat a Hard Drive for a dentists whose wife had that horrible porn adware. Ya'know, the kind that you can never completley remove, even when you tweak the registry, without having to re-format. That stuff is the worst, espacially when your talking about a 60-year-old Grandmother.

The bigger problem was that there were several websites that the dentist went to that required IE so they couldn't completely part with IE.

The happy ending was that I got my Vector Lappy out of the deal.

IMO, the only thing that's a bigger security risk then IE is the Registry. You see even if you could get spyware installed on a Linux machine without the user's or superuser's knowledge until it manifests itself, it can't keep reappearing because it isn't in the registry.

Oh that happened to me a couple of months ago. A family friend lent her lappy 2 a pal for a couple of days and when it came back IE had basically been hijacked to point to porn sites each time it loaded, no amount of cleaning could remove the viruses and trojans, so I had to reformat coz there was no way she could use her laptop in public coz porn would just pop up. now she says she prefers firefox, it's saved her from a lot of grief.