New research from The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology has revealed that Internet users who use Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) software to browse the net are most at risk due to using outdated versions.

Just 47% of IE users were using the latest and most secure version, which compares with 56% of Opera users, 65% of Safari users and 83% of Firefox users. To make matters worse, barely more than 52% of IE surfers have upgraded to the latest version (IE7).

The problem is particularly bad for Microsoft users because IE is still the dominant platform with a 78% market share. This compares with Firefox on 16%, Safari with 3% and Opera pulling in the last 1%.

It's also worth pointing out that IE6 and older versions were particularly bad at rendering web design standards, thus your visual browsing experience may also suffer. So the message is simple, upgrade or switch to Firefox / Opera.