Internet Explorer is great! It's ugly and whatnot but its incredibly safe and secure, perfect for things like this.
Well I wouldn't go quite that far.
Years ago it was the only real browser so those wanting to do naughty things targetted it, well why wouldn't you it had 90%+ of the people using it.
Now its still got a lot of users but its far from a massive % of users using it, the attacks tend to be a lot more generic focussed rather than specific browser exploits.
I personally use IE and Chrome. I prefer IE, but use chrome from some sites as I thought IE was misbehaving, after using Chrome I now know its the site not the browser thats playing up.
At work we still use some old IE, 6 or 5 or something its terribly outdated.
One thing I don't get is the fixation wih old Browsers and old OS that work environments still insist on using. I swear the reason the other half has so many IT issues is the OS just isn't upto all the different networks, VPNs etc its used to connect to. They just wern't used when the OS was designed so its hardly unexpected it doesn't handle them well.
Back to original subject, I have only ever used a "proper" login etc, but recently I did need to use a card number when opening my ISA. (It worked fine though)