Imo, the study is quite inaccurate, although it's well explained the results.
@Renegade: Not really, I actually got this from a friend of mine in google+ lol
But I know there's a guy at UP, called "radio".. something, who posts about this kind of news very often.
@Evilgrins: "B) Other browsers may require more intelligence given they lack features IE..."
If we go that way, then you will loose. Did you know that IE is considered the worst browser EVER to make something actually "work"? You have to download extra MBs everytime in data which are no more than images and scripts with hacks just to make something "simple" to work, something that works flawlessly under any other browser with no complications.
I bet everyone using IE does not know what webdesign is, IE is simply the worst browser to work for. The amount of limitations (Not features, LIMITATIONS actually) IE has compared to other browsers... damn! And you say "more features"? IE is always several steps behind all the other browsers actually.
We webdesigners/coders (I do PHP/JS/Ajax/CSS/html/, etc, as a living btw) have always to test a website or any feature of our website in both IE and any other browser.
All the other browsers are excellent and provide a great CSS and Javascript support since IE6 (CSS 3.0, something IE didn't have until IE9), we have literally to have a CSS to all browsers and then a specific CSS for IE, can you believe this?
What IE9 brings, FireFox and the other browsers already brought since IE6 and IE7.
"C) FireFox is more prone to attract viruses than IE or other browsers I'm familiar with. Linux browsers tend to need more active menu usage as the key combinations that do commands do n't function as well under it."
Again, I don't know where did you get that from, but that's completelly untrue. Actually is the other way around. IE has what's called ActiveX controllers, many viruses were spread thanks to this, therefore IE was highly affected by this.
Relative the other kinds of malware, IE and FireFox for example are somewhat "equally prone", because many of them enter because of "you", the user himself who accepts scans and clicks here and there.
The biggest security flaw in someone's PC nowadays has nothing to do with software actually, it's the actual human behind it, and this is more than evident, plus, you may find more FireFox users than IE users in google saying they have malware in their browser, but that doesn't mean anything, specially since:
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
We're comparing more than 40% (users Firefox) to less than 25% (users IE), so saying something like that doesn't make any sense since there are waaay more FireFox users than IE users.
Also, I use Linux at work everyday, use many browsers to test my own stuff and to navigate normally, and Linux browsers actually became better than some of their Windows version, and never missed a shortcut or menu that existed in Windows, and I am more a "drag and drop" guy than a "command line" guy unlike my colleagues (although I have to use them anyway for svn and to run my own shell scripts for some automatization in my work).
So, moral of story: there are many more FireFox users than IE and if you ask any professional webdeveloper who actually scripts and develops css, what they think about IE, they won't be nice at all. At least I don't know any who likes IE at all.
From the user side, he's more prone to find much more website bugs in IE than in FireFox (css and js wise), that's 100% guaranteed.
EDIT: Ever wondered why some websites take longer to take off? Basically you develop a feature client-side, you take 1 day to make it work in FireFox, Chrome AND Opera, and the rest of the week just to run "reasonably" in IE.