Is moving off of IE really the solution?

An article in informationweek discusses the move by Penn State to encouage all students and faculty to move off of Microsoft Internet Explorer

Here is a small piece of what the article says:
A public university with an enrollment of over 80,000 put the kibosh this week on Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and urged its students to switch to alternative browsers such as Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, or Safari.
Penn State University on Wednesday issued an alert to students and staff recommending that they dump IE and use a different browser.

"The University computing community [should] use standards-based Web browsers other than Internet Explorer to help minimize exposure to attacks that occur through browser vulnerabilities," added ITS.

Some of the problems from IE are caused by programming bugs and other vulnerabilities are features designed to make a users life easier. Unfortunately there are people that exploit these things in malicious ways and cause users trouble.

Do these "naughty hackers" take advantage of IE because the flaws are there or do they target IE because it controls a huge percentage of the browser market. If Firefox controlled 50% of the browser market how long would it be before these folks find flaws to take advantage of in Firefox. I suspect it would not be to long.

There was a time when the phone was used maliciously on a regular basis to make crank calls. The implmentation of caller-id technology and call blocking was put in to prevent a significant amount of these problems and it worked for awhile. It wasn't long before "caller-id spoofing" was available and the problems have resurfaced. I think the same is true in browser switching, the trouble will be back sooner then Penn State realizes.

I will stick with IE and rely on my virus protection and spyware protection to keep me safe, for now :)