This involves security flaws and the potential for malicious Webmasters to wreak all kinds of havoc on your hard drives using Internet Explorer as the gateway to your computer and all the data stored in it.

Microsoft, quite wisely, has made sure that a patch is available for the security holes, discovered by some college students.

In fact, Microsoft posted a message last week saying the patch would be available within 24 hours, which is a rapid response for a company of its size.

My concern, beyond the obvious implications for data security and privacy, is that this revelation about serious bugs in Internet Explorer 3 has emerged even as Microsoft is shifting focus away from this version towards its flagship version 4 browser.

It seems fairly clear that the source of an almost endless series of bugs in release versions of Microsoft and Netscape's Web browsers is due to the two firms constantly racing to outdo each other.

As one company introduces new features, the other company rushes to incorporate them into its models and to add new ones, which in turns perpetuates the cycle.

Large programs like word processors, graphics software and even browsers are all expected to have a few small bugs because of the sheer number of lines of source code required to produce the software. The critical difference here is that a bug in a word processor or graphics package will usually only cause the software to crash, or at worst corrupt or destroy a file.

However with a browser, which is not designed for use in a stand-alone environment, but primarily for when a computer is connected to a wider network such as the Internet, bugs are potentially dangerous in terms of security and privacy.

For this reason alone, one would think that more time would be devoted to eliminating as many serious bugs as possible from browsers. The contrary has proven true over the past few years. It is almost as if the companies feel that since most people use these browsers free they deserve a less than professional product.

This is an attitude I cannot tolerate. Neither company seems to have adopted a fully professional development cycle for their browser product lines.

In the long run this will only hurt the users of these products. All it takes is one major bug which is not caught in time and millions of people could find their private data and computer file systems compromised.

This should not be allowed to happen. We are users and customers and not guinea pigs and we should let the companies know that we do not appreciate being treated as such.