Hi Logos,
To turn the tables again will take a lot of propaganda and making somehow you cannot go around the built-in software browser. It is always funny to see that where critique on IE is concerned some mainly US users almost react as if you attacked their home-base. One must admit that building their browser deep, deep into the OS brought Windows an important leap-start against competitive third party software browsers. It was a clever trick and brought competitor Netscape to its knees. Their slower browser got already half way up from boot time while the other browser was not even launched from the desktop. Google independent process per tab browsing was the answer to that trick, and also was cleverly anticipated and off course now imitated by the Mozilla browser. The as per default installation also brought that the masses thought that IE was the only way they knew to go unto the web, the EU regulations brought another landscape since their regulations.
After leaning back for a long, long time, after numerous mishaps like with the ActiveX disaster, still haunting us with malware, finally MS realized that if they did not invest and improve their IE it would endanger their revenue streams and they woke up with IE8 and are even improving further with IE9,
Alas there has not been any monopoly since the Roman Empire that lived forever and it seems Google for one could come as a serious threat to the Windows mono-culture.
And I really don't know if IE would have NoScript, RequestPolicy and AdBlock+ extensions for it, I would consider going back to IE. For now the blue e browser is only for updates and upgrades because that is vital for the security of the OS. But I would not come running to defend any browser....
And about the many, many bugs in Mozilla, well I have been a Fx test-pilot for some time and they have a large developer base to file bugs, loads of them are made public and are quickly patched, also cause regressional problems, that has to be dealt with,
and open source and propriety source cannot be compared, as apples are no pears and both do not taste like bananas...
polonus