Peter

Popups are the least of the reasons to switch from IE to Firefox or Opera. ActiveX hijacking is the biggest one. Sick and tired of some advert outfit hijaking your home page, your 404 error pages and a myriad of other nasties?

That's the main reason to give IE the shaft. Nothing like a browser that's completely immune to crap like that.

Firefox's character entity, HTML and CSS support is a mile ahead of IE's as well though that'll mean diddly squat to most users.

Don

Just downloaded the free version of Panicware and tried it out by going to the www.telegraph.co.uk site (always full of pop-ups).

Seems to work! No popups.

MarkMyWords

So turn cookies off.

Every piece of software on your machine is potentially spyware. Do you really trust Microslop any more than you might now trust Google? And what about all those free games? Dodgy doesn't begin to cover it. As someone just said, open source is the only potentially trustworthy stuff, although even then a reasonable programmer could disguise stuff if they wanted to, for a while at least. (Not for that long perhaps, if the level of review is high enough.)

I'm not particularly defending Google, just trying to add a little perspective.

There are many other search engines out there too, it's just that people tend to forget about them. I wonder what a Google search for "search engines" comes up with?

Mummy

Altavista!