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Downloads last Thursday rose from the usual average of 100,000 to 200,000. In fact both Mozilla and Firefox downloads have been steadily increasing over the last 12 months. Mozilla and Firefox, like other browsers such as Opera or Apple's Mac-only Safari, do not support Microsoft's ActiveX plug-in technology, which is inadvertently proving a useful tool for hackers who wish to gain access to computer systems.

US-CERT, the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team, which was established in the wake of 9-11, made the recommendation following the discovery of another security flaw in IE last week and its potential exploitation by the download.ject virus.

Vulnerabiity Note VU#713878,

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, 'Microsoft Internet Explorer does not properly validate source of redirected frame', reads, 'There are a number of significant vulnerabilities in technologies relating to the IE domain/zone security model, the DHTML object model, MIME type determination, and ActiveX. It is possible to reduce exposure to these vulnerabilities by using a different web browser, especially when browsing untrusted sites.'

Although it does go on to caution that, 'using a different web browser will not remove IE from a Windows system, and other programs may invoke IE, the WebBrowser ActiveX control, or the HTML rendering engine (MSHTML).'

Internet Explorer acounts for the vast majority, around 94 per cent of Internet traffic, according to OneStat.com, but this year its share has fallen, to the benefit of Mozilla and its variants, Opera and Safari.

Security updates for Windows and IE, which all users should download regardless of the browser they use, are available from windowsupdate.microsoft.com. Later this year Microsoft will release Windows XP Service Pack 2, which includes an improved security infrastructure, a pop-up blocker and a download monitoring tool.