its not a flawed product more a targeted product because of it success! we all know I.E even if we hate it, it has to be admired. i have used loads of browsers such as firefox, opera, safari, netscape, chrome, etc etc and have to say they all have flaws firefox is one of the buggiest heaps of !*!@# i have ever used (using it know!!!)chrome is not much better. opera is good but not every page supports opera. and the rest are not worth talking about. the only reason i use firefox is for the addons such as ad block etc other wise i would be using opera and i.e 8! as for your advice i personally would just install a good internet security package i.e kaspersky or nod32 or similar. as i would not trust windows firewall to protect my pc!! as for iffy chinese web sites wouldn't know about that sort of thing!