I use IE as part of Maxthon, and I experience no security issues whatsoever as a result of it. Even on high risk sites, a combination of my IE settings, maxthon settings, anti-spyware settings, and NOD32 antivirus settings does not allow anything even remotely malicious to ever touch my hard drive. I scan for spyware daily via task scheduler, and not once have I found anything with any of the 3 programs I use for it. Viruses also have been nonexistent. If you are competent enough to configure firefox, you are competent enough to use IE and IE based browsers without risk to your data or network. so now that the security issues are out of the way, the choice becomes one of personal preference as it relates to speed and features. we all know IE opens quicker, thanks to being integrated with the shell. all reasonably unbiased tests have shown that IE outperforms firefox speed-wise on all measurable page rendering tasks, from tables to scripts. Firefox 1.0 and 1.1 both have a documented memory leak issue, which causes it to bloat and bloat RAM usage-wise the longer you leave it open for. IE has no such flaw, and furthermore, IE with maxthon uses less than 1/2 the amount of ram as firefox or IE alone. featurewise, IE with maxthon can easily compete head-to-head with firefox and any extensions. A large number of firefox extensions are written by amateur programmers and will subject your browser and machine to unnecessary bugs and crashes. I say this from 1 year+ experience using firefox as my main browser. IE with maxthon suffers from no such handicap, and has yet to crash on me a single time. Not so much as a stutter. The benefits of open source and freeware are shouted from the rooftops by slashdotters and firefox fanboys worldwide, however, the reality is that in a large number of cases, INCLUDING firefox, open source development cripples the software as a result of the sheer number of people working on the literally thousands of bugs that are known and repeatable at any given time. The code is not contiguous or written in a way that compliments itself from every direction, and is not developed in a linear, organized fashion in the same way that software from Microsoft or comparable organizations is. Bottom line is, if you prefer firefox for whatever reason, great. Use it. If you are like me and you give everything out there a shot, and let the winner show itself through time and experience, then chances are good you're going to end up using an IE based solution just as I have. just my two cents. p.s. i use outlook express, because my pop3 email is secondary, i get zero junk mail through it, and i don't use it for anything serious. GMail is my number 1, and all of my domain mail is forwarded to my gmail box.