Because, while being much superior to its previous versions, is still many miles away behind the other browsers.

The difference might not be apparent to normal users, but the people working with it see that. It's slow, and it's coverage of current standards is horrible. IE is holding the web back for 10 years now, with great success, and IE8 walks the same path.

As someone more eloquent put it: trust the geeks. And the web geeks have been chanting for 8 years now: IE is BAD, use something else, cause their monopoly is keeping the web from going further.

When did you last check? 1995?

Sadly, this used to be the case for many years. But nowadays (helped - as you mention - by joining the EU) it's much better. I can easily shop online with various credit cards, use PayPal etc. Shipping fees to the country have dropped and outside perception (EU at least) seems to be growing. Not thanks to articles like the one we are discussing here, that paints a quite innacurate image, generalizing contextual information, very much in a tabloid fashion.

Fraud still exists of course, as it does in many developing nations, trying to adapt their police and control agencies to the digital era. But contrary to many opinions i've seen ventured here it's *much* better than some years ago. And as a person working in IT, I can assure you I have never seen/heard of the public "online fraud companies" that one user describes in an above post. (a +4 informative one at that).