If you're visiting family over the holiday, turn off Internet Explorer.

Follow the OP's advice: don't remove IE unless it is unused! You may lose a convert by removing it without explanation.<p>My parents navigate the Internet by clicking the arrow next to the address bar, and clicking the webpage they want to use. The last time I tried converting them, they also used work-related webpages with ActiveX controls, which no sane browser would ever support. Tech is slow outside of the tech industry.<p>My parents' Chrome usage would be a play in three Acts:<p>Act 1: <i>Confusion</i>. "Where did my Sites go? The ones that were on top. I used to click something to click the sites, but now that's gone. There's no arrow! I have to open History? I didn't have to do that before. Where did my Homepage go? What's a 'tab'?"<p>Act 2: <i>Judgement</i>. "I had this the way I like it before. I don't think I can get used to using this. And I couldn't use the Work system, so I have to keep switching between things."<p>Act 3: <i>Trashbin</i>. "That Google thing? I uninstalled that. We didn't like it. And we couldn't use it for Work."<p>As they say, the best user interface is the one you already know how to use.

As a developer who's deeply tied into web technologies, I cannot help but grin at this post. Unfortunately, I know where this is going to lead, however. My mother visits a site that embeds WMV-based videos for her Russian TV shows. It was not until she purchased a new MacBook that I realized that this was the site she visits 90% of the time she's on the Internet. I thought installing Flip4Mac would solve her crisis, and it partially did, video and audio came in through Firefox as expected. With that said, seeking within the video does not work as naturally well as it does in IE. In fact, it doesn't work at all. The end result was I purchased my mother VMWare Fusion 3, a copy of Windows XP, and ended up having to tutor her on the usage of a virtual machine, the mechanics between how to seamlessly work with the two operating systems, etc. I still get daily tech support calls that eat up a lot of my personal time, now not only for the MacBook, but for VMWare Fusion, Windows XP and IE/Safari usage.<p>The web developer in me loathes IE for obvious reasons which will not be reiterated here for the billionth time. The son in me kind of wishes my mother just had a simple netbook running windows xp, IE, and nothing else.

Better yet, why not install Google Chrome and replace their Internet Explorer link with a link to Google Chrome? Just make the link have IE's icon so that they don't wonder where the internet has gone.<p>They will marvel about how you "made their internet faster." I like to make it even easier for people by making two different links: one called "Internet" which takes them to Google, the other called "Email" which takes them to their web email. The results are instant simplification, security improvement, and general betterment of the web by migrating more people to the Webkit rendering engine.

Current 0-day or no, you'll be doing much more good in the long run if you replace the pre-installed acrobat reader with a 3rd party viewer.

Actually my parents are using a Debian box with Chromium. I found it is a lot easier to manage remotely than a Windows box; it's really low maintenance; they won't grab malware and the Gnome desktop can be really dumbed down - I only left the window switcher, shortcuts for chromium and skype on the panel and on the desktop, time and date, volume control.

Saw this bug on a security researcher's tweet couple of weeks ago: <a href="http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2010/Dec/110" rel="nofollow">http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2010/Dec/110</a><p>Today found a great write up about how to exploit it here: <a href="http://www.breakingpointsystems.com/community/blog/ie-vulnerability/" rel="nofollow">http://www.breakingpointsystems.com/community/blog/ie-vulner...</a><p>I have no idea what any of it means. If anyone has any good links that teaches newbie concepts to these things, please do share. Thanks.

Is IE8 really so bad?

I convinced them to switch to a new iMac.<p>Mission accomplished.

That frozen-industrial-wasteland photo of Helsinki is awesome.

Uh...Chrome Frame?

1. Remove all shortcuts to Internet explorer from the start menu, mydocuments, desktop, and search menus.<p>2. Install latest version of firefox, use IE themes.<p>3. Make a shortcut to start firefox, but change the icon to internet explorer, the retarded blue 'e' symbol.<p>4. Make sure you get all the bookmarks copied over.<p>5. Make sure any buttons, keys or special behavior moved to equal features on firefox.<p>6. Also put some firefox shortcut icons around the start menu and desktop.<p>They won't even notice anything is different, and if they do, tell them they had to radically update it so that it would be more secure and faster.<p>If they were tech savvy enough to notice what you were doing, they would have the skill to change it back, and most likely would be already using firefox.