Re:An important security sidenote (Score 1)

My first instinct would be that the HTML parsing engine in Internet Explorer was written by a different team of programmers than worked on the rest of the software, and they used proper programming techniques (such as RAII in C++, or perhaps used one of their .NET languages, rather than programming in straight C like the others) which as a side effect prevented such problems.

No part of IE is written in any .NET language. If it was then the .NET framework would have to be installed to run IE. This is not the case, there are many Windows machines that can use the current version of IE and don't have .NET.
I suspect that IE code is written in C++. However, last year Microsoft released a version of the C runtime library that protects against buffer overruns (all buffers are bounds checked). I suspect that this is what has removed the vulnerabilities. This library is freely available, so the other browsers targetted for Windows should be able to improve too.