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The Firefox web browser has an extention called IETab which enables you to open a tab and browse websites via Firefox, but using the Internet Explorer rendering engine. This can help, for instance, if a site staunchly proclaims itself "IE only" and will not make changes for alternate browsers. Over at Hacking for Christ, Gervase Markham has a post entitled "IETab Considered Harmful?". He references the Slashdot article about MovieLink suggesting that users use IETab so MovieLink doesn't have to go to the "trouble" of making their web site Firefox compatible. Gerv observes:

The harm is that this 'solution' still excludes everyone on a Mac or on Linux, and its availability also makes the site far less likely to change to support Firefox properly. In other words, whereas before Mac and Linux users could add Windows Firefox users to their numbers when petitioning sites to upgrade to support web standards, the existence of IETab divides those two groups and gives those of us using non-Windows operating systems, and those who want to see sites supporting standards properly, far less clout.

Very true. The problem I have with IETab, however, is one of security. If you are using the IE rendering engine, you are opening yourself up to all the problems, standards non-compliance, and security holes you'd have if you used Internet Explorer directly. I keep telling friends, family, clients, and colleagues to use Firefox for better security. If there are sites out there encouraging users to "just install IETab to use our site," most of that security advantage will be negated.

At the conservative end, I think IETab should carry a big, fat warning along the lines of "This plugin is for development and testing only! Using it may compromise your system's security!" On the extreme end, I would have it done away with altogether. If you need multiple versions of IE for testing, on the Linux side of things, there is IEs4Linux, which allows you to install and run multiple versions of Internet Explorer on your Linux machine. I'm sure there is something similar for Windows. For Mac, you're still stuck, as IE no longer is available for Mac (at least last I checked). I suppose you could install Linux under Parallels and then install IEs4Linux.

So, yes Gerv, IETab is harmful, but not only for the reasons you bring up.