druser

Because firefox is more secure and standards compliant, I think you should use it. IE supports ActiveX, the most spyware is installed through that system. Internet explorer is less compliant to the w3c standards then firefox

you can get a free ubuntu hard copy from shipit.ubuntu.com. Linux is open source, it's the base, the kernel of 400 linux distribtions. The most linux distributions are open source, there isn't a real company behind it, but a whole community. On distrowatch you can find the most popular linux distributions.