There you touched upon a very important but often ignored factor: microsoft software is being used an awful lot, so if a virus maker gets into one of these products, he's able to do more damage than when he's able to break through the security of some obscure browser nobody uses. Result: a zillion viruses in for example IE, and one or two in the obscure browser. This says nothing about the inherent safety of either browser. Only if you'd somehow know how many attempts were made to break through each browser's safety and how many of those were successful, you could start to assess the inherent safety of each. Of course, for the end user only the practical safety is of importance: how much chance do I have of getting a virus? That's a tough one to answer. A popular, safe yet heavily attacked browser or an obscure, maybe less safe but also less attacked browser?
Anyway, indeed you can go for IE6, I've even had that running on win'95 IIRC. And IE6 still is quite up to date indeed, it will be a lot safer than IE5.5.
So, let's try downloading and installing IE6 then, shall we?
