Hi -midnight,
In the States there are still a lot of folks that think that IE also known as Blue E is the only way of going to the Internet, so many folks are so in the habit of using the Windows browser they think there is no alternative. There is other browsers to make or set to be your default in Windows 8.1 (I use firefox and Google Chrome on my Windows 8.1 notebook my wife gave me). I leave IE on, but do not use it for browsing, and download all the updates for Windows.
Some ill-informed users now als shun updating and installing new versions of their Google browser (users afraid of privacy reasons as the recent revelations made that a lot of people that are not so technically in the know and do not know where to start shun Google updates because they are freaked out by the recent global monitoring news. Not to update and fully patch is the dumbest thing one can do security wise.
Always update everything reliable, so also Google chrome and extensions, firefox and add-ons!With Windows 10 Microsoft is to introduce a brand new browser named Edge. Edge will be more secure. It will have MemCG, no more ActiveX, there will always be a sandbox, a complete new extension model with a lot of API's that will be dumped like for VBscript, VML and BHO also some old document modi and XHU-header are left. But it will partly still depend on old IE code, but there are certainly improvements.
Bad thing is they will make it harder for users to set their default browser to be another browser with additional clicks to perform. So they properly will have the same trouble again in Europe considering free choice of browser! They are going to that same river again and making that same protectionistic mistakes again (Some American giant firms never learn
).
There are several reasons to better wait to install or upgrade to windows 10 and with the free updates possible for all of the coming year, you'd better advised to wait a bit. So for instance with Windows 10 they no longer will support desktop gadgets anymore, so you'd miss news and weather gadgets there.
polonus