Well my statement was responding to somebody that said IE = Windows.
See, that's where you misunderstand. I've been in the business since about 79. I was a teen in 79, but got a job feeding punch cards on weekends. See my FR profile if you wish to be nauseated. I personally support everything and I have a mandrake box here at the house.
I too started my computer career in 1979 - working for Wang Labs - I was 19.I did field support of Minicomputers which included cool stuff like replacing heads and platters in hard drives (monsters the size of washing machines with platters bigger than Frisbees) – ah, the good old days when I carried around an oscilloscope and computers were big and in rooms with elevated floors and glass doors and guys in white lab coats.
I don't hate Microsoft. I do however have a userbase that I and my staff support. I'm moving them over to Firefox for general browsing and only IE when absolutely necessary. At some point in early/mid 2003, we were fighting spyware so much that it was taking 50% of the time of my staff to fix it. I got some of the heavy users(Researchers and fact finders) to switch to Firebird(beta .7 of what became Firefox). The problems evaporated. I now know how to clean just about everthing and how to lock down a machine. Back then, even trusted zones would get spyware sites added.
I have tons of problems with Sypware at home - but we have no real problems at work. I guess your company always "free range" browsing at work. Nevertheless, what you did sounds smart.
At this point in time, anyone in the business cannot possible suggest people use Internet Explorer unless absolutely required.
My company (not mine personally, the one I work for) has tens of thousands of customers with hundreds of products and all we support is IE.
No matter how hard they try, malware authors will never be able to cause the havoc to FF as they do to IE.
Now that statement is complete nonsense. FireFox has been around for about a month or two and they have already found a serious vulnerability.
Not true. Firefox has been around for as Beta's for at least a year. I think I first installed Firebird Circa Oct 2003.
The issue is the IE can run in the Local zone. Compromise a module in IE, quite often you've compromised windows. The same cannot be said for Firefox. I'm not saying it's immune. By it's nature however it's more secure by default.
As to vulns in Firefox, there were a number that hit in the beta. The one you're referring to is a Phishing Vuln. Using Spoofstick would alert you to the issue. The other is that you have to go to a site and download some Malware.
This is quite a different issue than IE where the Malware folks just crossscript a site, download the Malware in the background for you and you havn't a clue anything happened at all. Orders of magnitude in difference.