Brian Krebs put up an excellent article at the Washington Post, analyzing how many days in 2006 IE was vulnerable because of critical, unpatched security problems for which documentation and/or exploit code was available online. IE’s record is abysmal: 284 days of vulnerability, or more than 9 months.
In contrast, Firefox had exactly one period of 9 days in 2006 where a patch for a critical vulnerability was not available.