Here's how I browse the web:
The latest version of Firefox + NoScript + a few other privacy and cookie
blocker extensions on my main machine, with no plugins. This is what I use
to access web mail / web banking / etc... I use SumatraPDF as my PDF
viewer. I just use the free MS security essentials for AV.
Then I have a Windows XP image in VMWare running Firefox along with
NoScript, just about every plugin (Flash, Java, Shockwave, Djvu, QuickTime,
etc...) and Adobe Acrobat. It has a resident Kaspersky AV scanner running
all the time, and McAfee command line does a system scan at boot time. This
is what I use to do casual web browsing, watching videos, etc...
NoScript takes care of a lot of problems. If I get sent to a web site that
has a big "Plugin blocked" icon on it, I know something fishy is going on,
especially since I already have every plugin under the sun installed in the
VMware browser.
I've been playing around with scripting to see if I can get copied URLS to
automatically open in Firefox in the VM image.