You are right, some day it is possible that spyware may start to hit mozilla’s suite of tools as it has IE, Outlook Express, etc. However, when it does I believe mozilla will be a much faster moving target than than a proprietary product like Internet Explorer. I think holes will be plugged much more quickly than they can ever be in IE or other MSFT products. If I’m wrong then firefox will sink like IE and someone else will come about to compete at which point we’ll all switch to them. The great thing about commodity software like browsers and mail clients is that they are all standards based and I can swap one out for another at anytime without to much of a headache.

Is the problem with IE or with the spyware developers? Should we not be directing efforts to towards finding a solution of this and the myriad other problems rather than pointing fingers and wasting tefforts and limited resources.?

Admittedly. MS could and should do a MUCH better job at building ’ships’ without holes than they do. But they, in and of themselves, are not the problem. The spyware sharks are.