tedster - 8:49 am on Jul 13, 2004 (gmt 0)

if Opera or Mozilla were at this level of saturation then they would be the number one brunt of hacks, exploits and bugs too

Yes, it's true that the most used applications will be the biggest targets.

But because Opera and Mozilla are not integrated so tightly into the OS, even if they were in wide use there would most likely be fewer succesful exploits - and the ones that did succeed would also be less devastating.

Microsoft's decision years ago to integrate IE into the OS seems to have been made more for marketing purposes than from a position of technical wisdom.