Thanks for the information.
Though I have personally had no problems at all with IE, because of the rap on IE out there, I’ve tried FireFox regularly over the years. But I have always found bugs and problems with it in certain situations such that it just would not allow me to accomplish the work I needed to do on the specific website, so that I had to remember to go back to IE when I was doing said specific things on said specific websites. That got tiresome and inconvenient, so I just went back to using IE6, but I never upgrade to IE7 (or Media Player 10, Vista, etc etc) because I have found either the newer M-soft stuff doesn’t work as well as older versions, or I just don’t like the features as well. I do however, pick and choose, and do download M-soft security updates.
I use Thunderbird Mozilla for email for a specific feature I like about it, but there are some features about it that really suck, so I may move on to some other email client. My wife still uses Outlook Express (for years now) and has never experienced any problems. I used it also for years before I switched to Mozilla Thunderbird about a year ago.
If FireFox would fix their bugs or someone else comes up with a browser that is completely free of bugs so I don’t have to be switching back and forth to IE to accompish things, then I am more than happy to switch over.
While you may not think you have any problems, malware installed via IE could be sending your personal info to all kinds of bad guys anywhere. The days when viruses, worms, trojans, etc. were written by pimply faced teenagers staying up all nite on Jolt Cola with the express purpose to crash computers or destroy data has changed. Now it's big business and the programmers don't want to cause any visible problems because that way you'd know your machine is compromised. Most people nowdays would never know if they had tons of malware sending their keystrokes, passwords, banking PINs etc. off to a server in some foreign country. They write the programs to disable/bypass anti-virus programs but not leave any obvious symptoms of the infection.
Believe me, I've got a friend's infected machine sitting here right now that I'm trying to clean up for him without him losing all his documents, pictures, bookmarks, etc. The only thing he noticed was that it was running slower and slower and after a while his browser and some other programs wouldn't run. Running AdAware, SpybotS&D, HijackThis and others only found a couple of obvious infections, but it still won't work even with a new browser install.
But I have always found bugs and problems with it in certain situations such that it just would not allow me to accomplish the work I needed to do on the specific website...
Don't blame FireFox or other browsers. The problem is whoever wrote the website used Microsoft proprietary code that isn't standards compliant and will only work with IE and will break any other browsers. Few people are aware of this problem and blame the other browsers, which are standards compliant and go back to IE, which is not. What you need to do is send an email to the operator of the website that doesn't work in non-IE browsers and let them know that you won't be patronizing their website/business unless they fix the problem and become standards compliant. If enough people did this, the flood of email would make any business change. No business wants to drive/turn away business clients. If you just go along and change back to IE, you are perpetuating this non-compliance with web standards and compounding the problem for everyone else.
There are hundreds if not thousands of websites that have explained and documented this problem, and almost all the time the problem is Microsoft-centric, non-standards compliant website programming. If you have any question about whether this is true, just run the website URL you have problems with through any of the web standards compliance checking sites like W3C.org. You'll quickly find that the problem is generally ['tho not always] the website, not the browser.
If FireFox would fix their bugs or someone else comes up with a browser that is completely free of bugs so I don’t have to be switching back and forth to IE to accompish things...
As above, it is usually not FF that is the problem. They've had their share of problems, but the code is fixed almost immediately and updated versions are available almost immediately, where Microsoft's patches can be months to years after the breach/hole/exploit is found. And again, almost all of the security holes cannot and will not be fixed in IE and Outlook, because they would have to change the underlying O/S code, which would break the O/S.
If you were running FF on Linux with update notification active, you would be getting notifications of updates and bug fixes within hours or a few days of the exploit being discovered- and patched/corrected. And it just has to update the FF program code only, which doesn't touch the O/S system files or code.
A little research will confirm everything I've written here. Again, don't blame FF or other programs when it is Microsoft centric problems that you experience.