The other week was a busy time for me, as reporters sought my opinion about a newly emerged virus and advice from US security organisation Cert.

The virus is a particularly clever one, spreading through the universally abhorred pop-ups and infecting victims' computers with a subtle program to capture authentication details for online banking.

Cert's response was pretty stark, advising internet users throughout the world that now is, perhaps, the time to move away from Microsoft's Internet Explorer. The organisation suggested that users should consider shifting their allegiance to a browser not as susceptible to the multitude of problems to which IE seems prone - and if survey reports are to be believed, it seems that many people have heeded its advice.

The question I was asked in repeated interviews was a straightforward one: is such advice appropriate, and will users who migrate be better protected?

This is a difficult question. Microsoft applications in general are a relatively easy target for hackers and virus writers. First, their ubiquity means that effort expended on locating vulnerabilities is repaid handsomely by a particularly large number of potential victims. Second, Microsoft has not done itself any favours by repeatedly launching ill-tested systems and belatedly - sometimes unsuccessfully - attempting to repair holes that users encounter in the wild. Worse, known holes are not fixed: even now, an XP laptop that I maintain behind a personal firewall, with all the latest patches and antivirus tools, is vulnerable to at least one remote-execution threat.

But would moving to a different browser help? Perhaps in the short term, yes. Because Netscape, Mozilla et al are not as widely targeted, and because they are better maintained, they are certainly now not as vulnerable. But that does not mean they are invulnerable; sooner or later, if they become widely enough used to present an attractive target, then the hackers will find their vulnerabilities. All programs have vulnerabilities, and to believe otherwise is not sensible.

Perhaps the best strategy is therefore to continue to use browsers - and indeed, entire operating environments - that are not so popular, in the hope that being a minnow in an ocean of whales protects you from exciting the hackers' interests. Of course, that strategy leads to other problems: Microsoft has a habit of buying up competitors to quash their products; and comparatively unpopular products are seldom as well supported. Open source might be an answer, but even that is prone to the vagaries of fashion.

There seems therefore to be little choice in a world in which hackers and virus writers run wild. Stick with Microsoft, and have a convenient but continually vulnerable environment; or move away to an inconvenient and eventually vulnerable platform. The proverbial rock and a hard place.

Me? Well, I'm already beginning to price up Apple Mac laptops and that wonderfully translucent desktop system. They might not be any more secure in the long run, but they're certainly prettier.