While I've seen plenty of times where a users profile on a terminal server is not usable and they get a temporary profile (usually the result of someone with permission deleting the local copy of their profile incorrectly or messing with permissions), but I can't say I've ever had a local, stand alone profile go corrupt.
Happened to my son's Windows 10 laptop last summer. Happened to my Windows Vista laptop back around 2008.
While hard drives are much more reliable than they used to be, heat, shock, and just plain old time can result in an imperceptible surface defect becoming perceptible, which usually means either unreadable or corrupted.
Windows NTFS, found from around NT 3.51 through 10, employs a variety of data protective measures, including journaling, to "ensure that its complex internal data structures will remain consistent in case of system crashes or data moves performed by the defragmentation API, and allow easy rollback of uncommitted changes to these critical data structures when the volume is remounted."
If you want bulletproof hardware, however, you'll have to employ a two mirrored bootable, hardware-based RAID arrays.
That's expensive. For most of us, routine backups are good enough.
Firefox is also easy if you do it proactively, and even reactively, like in the case of something like this, if you know where to look and how to move the files around. Not quite as simple as IE, but not that hard. It would sure be nice if ALL of the browsers made use of the handy-dandy, simple to find, understand and back up 'Favorites' folder
I'm still waiting for the day when I can log onto any device and 100% of everything is stored in a secure, robust cloud with a bootable local backup in case the Internet goes down.
Back in the day, when IE8 was current, provided you didn't have junk toolbars, ESPECIALLY the Google toolbar, IE was the best browser out there. Rock solid, wasn't a resource hog. Now, though, let's be honest - they ALL suck, INCLUDING IE. Of course all the extra fluff on websites these days doesn't help.
No, I'm very happy with Google Chrome.
But I use Firefox on my left screen to watch Hulu and movies while surfing the net on my center screen through Chrome. Both work better when I split multi-media and surfing tasks between them. My right screen is reserved for Explorer, the file manager, not the browser. I haven't liked IE since, well, forever.