"Microsoft is almost certainly right to pin some blame
on add-on functionality to the browser as a security vulnerability.
But given that add-ons are a fact of life now, what is Microsoft
doing to protect its IE users against malware attacks?
"Plenty, and in perhaps in the most important place: the update
service. Both IE and Firefox include automatic update services, but
researchers for the Honeypot Project discovered that Firefox's
mechanism may actually be more effective:"