Unix as a whole has decades of development behind it. In the 1980's it was a popular and common hacker target; the security issues that plagued it were addressed, slowly and over time, but have been addressed.

Windows is in that position today. It will probably be a much more secure OS in about 5-10 years, but it is not there now. And now is the problem.

Before OS X I wouldn't touch a Mac with a 10 foot pole. The OS was mired in late 80's design and lacked the things that really, truly mattered - proper memory protection and multitasking just to name two. NT 4 was far ahead of the Mac in nearly every way that mattered to the IT shop.

I stand by my statement about Window's evolving code base, which has nothing to do with backwards compatibility. The amount of cruft that has accumulated from 3.1 to 98 to 98 to ME is enormous; Only once hitting 2000 and the unified driver model did some of the crap finally go. But there's still plenty there, and it just continues to grow. Only now, in the last two years, did Micosoft sit up and say "we gotta deal with this security thing".

"Any platform that can't do this doesn't *have* executable files". OS/400.

You seem convinced that the browser is the problem. The browser is only one part of the total security issue.