***Disclaimer: these opinions and views are my PERSONAL opinion and may be right or wrong.

A long time ago in a galaxy far away I was happy using IE6 and Symantec Antivirus and was pretty much sure I was protected from all kinds of malware, being very skeptical about all the IE vulnerability horror stories.

But you know what they say: "there are two types of users - the ones who already do backups, and the ones that will".

Of course after a while I accidentally discovered several trojan-programs on my drive. One was trying to connect to a botnet, another was trying to steal my email passwords... So I installed Comodo Firewall (which I believe is the best personal firewall software, which is also free) on all our machines, changed my antivirus, reconfigured my office and home routers and their built-in firewalls etc. etc. And moreover, I switched to Firefox.

But after many months and the release of IE 7 I'm back with IE and here is why:

1. Firefox is slow. Which is no surprise since much of Firefox and many extensions are written in Javascript (like any other application based on Mozilla's XUL platform).

2. IE7 is fast. In spite of all my toolbars - and I have ieHttpHeaders, IE Developer Toolbar, Google Toolbar, SEO Quake toolbar and more. But IE7 is still surprisingly fast

3. Memory requirements. I'm writing this post with 8 other tabs open in IE7, and two of them are loaded with heavy AJAX-rich Javascript applications that I've been running for more than two hours now. And IE7 uses only 89 Mb of memory. Firefox wants over 280 Mb for the same task, which is 3 times more.

4. Security & Privacy. IE7 comes with the latest code updates introduced in Windows XP SP2, including download blocker, improved URL parser, ActiveX add-on manager and optional Phishing Filter. IE7 also has privacy cleaners similar to the ones in Firefox (delete cookies, delete history, cache etc.)

5. W3C Standards. Firefox has always been a better renderer than IE6. Yes, writing HTML code for IE6 has always been a nightmare. Now IE7 has changed that.

(But still a lot of people use IE6, so we have to check our pages in it - we use a great tool called Multiple IE which makes it possible to test your websites under different IE versions, from 3 to 7).

6. Usability. I believe that IE7 has a cleaner look and is easier to navigate. IE7 finally has tabs, and tab-operations are simpler (for example, closing a tab in Firefox is a two-click operation).