IE is a fine browser, microsoft will be upgrading it when longhorn comes out, it'll be up to firefox's standard easy. They've practicly fixed most securety issues with it by releasing SP2. Most casual users couldn't be bothered installing firefox unless is had a huge advantage over it.IE needs...Full CSS 2 SupportAll Rendering Bug Fixes SortedCompatibilty with W3C Standards
Gmail is pretty good, compared to Hotmail. The only things that bug me are that it looks ugly/more choice of colours. They have no wysiwyg(html editing) for the compose, but its still in beta so those might change but its been in Beta for long bloody time.