I definitely agree that Internet Exploder is not something anyone should be using anymore.
Besides Mozilla/Firefox, and its commercialized Version Netscape 7.x, there is also Opera and there are several lesser known browsers becoming more popular. ALL of them are more secure than IE. Even the "MyIE" front end replacement is more secure in some ways, though it still uses the Windows HTML DLLs and so has most of the vulnerabilities of IE.
A firewall is not a bad idea but won't help against Gator and other 'spyware' that loads through web pages. Switching from IE is the best strategy to kill this sort of spyware because only IE supports 'ActiveX' in web pages which is
remote execution built into your browser. Yep, IE has insecurity designed in as a feature, not a bug.
Additionally, for real privacy I recommend a 'web filter' that can intercept nasty HTML and Javascript code before your browser even sees it. While Mozilla has internal settings that give you a lot more control over what web pages can do (like an option to simply
turn off popups) there is just nothing like being able to write your own scripts to kill advertising banners, neutralize snooping javascript, and
alter the appearance of the page if you want.
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