Microsoft has cleaned up its development process overall by emphasizing security threat analysis and reducing the attack surface in their code. They have made progress, so I am not surprised that there is less likely to be vulnerabilities in IE than in any other browser.

There is an explosion in the use of browsers on mobile devices. This is a huge, basically untapped market, and the field is wide open right now. Opera has been working on this technology, and I think they have an opportunity there.

Much will depend on how Microsoft ties Internet Explorer to its big releases next year.

What's happening with AJAX itself is it's catching on like wildfire at the grass roots.

Adobe is doing something that is the right thing to do for any vendor that has technology that has to do with the user experience. They are coexisting with AJAX. To some extent you could say that AJAX competes with Flex and Flash. It is widespread enough that vendors ignore it at their peril.