i remember way back in the day when Grey Ninja told everyone to switch to Firefox than titled Firebird.
It was the shiznit then and (aside from a few bumps in the road) it still is now.
I get so pissed when i have to use IE. I even get mad when i see others use IE. Now I'm trying to switched to Linux on Grey's orders(and cus my comptuer is infected), but its not as seemless as switching from ie to firefox.
Do what I did whenever I had to cleanup a computer after IE had introduced crap (I don't care how innocent people claim to be when this happens, stop doing stupid things on the internet). Remove the icon from the desktop and the start menu. It'll cut down on 99% of IE usage. Make it hard to get to. In this day and age, if a website mandates IE usage, they deserve to be lambasted for it.
As for Linux, its not a silver bullet which will make all your computer problems go away. Its a completely different paradigm (sure, you can get window managers which can look like Windows/Mac but underneath its a very different beast) and it can pretty bloody daunting initially - it was when I first had a go at Red Hat 6 (I think) years ago.
My advice: Start on an easy Linux distro. Ubuntu, Fedora or OpenSUSE have nice installers and support both major window managers (so you can install both and jump between the two until you find the one you like). Install it on a spare system if you can so that you can get stuff done if things go bad. Pplay around with it, learn how to do things like installing software, performing updates, customising the window manager and apps. Learn the things that are important to Linux - the filesystem setup, the command prompt, configuring update repositories, boot process, I could go on and on about this.
Most importantly, find out about what breaks and find the fixes for it - Google is your friend in this regard, and Ubuntu has a huge community with tips that you can apply to most other distros. If you've got a computer that is 12 months old or so, you shouldn't encounter any hardware issues (Wireless cards and some graphics cards are sometimes not recognised or not supported, but this is improving compared to how its been in the past) Get it to a point where you're happy with it, and make sure you've noted the key things you needed to do (URLs, steps, whatever) to get to that point.
Then, once you're feeling confident, make a list of the things you need to install, nuke it and start fresh. You don't need to know how to compile a kernel, but once you get a hang of the basics you'll appreciate the control that some of the Linux distributions offer (Arch Linux is still my favourite, and I used that as my sole OS for about 18 months at one point, but its been a while since I've been on that bandwagon).