Patrick is right that this is annoying and a design problem. Windows users are familiar with running applications in full-screen mode, which has none of the problems Patrick describes (but confuses the hell out of users of typical intelligence who can't grok the Alt-Tab idea).

The way I reduce the problem in OSX is to put the dock on the top right side of the screen and to size my initial IE window to be about an inch shorter vertically than the screen and about an inch and a half narrower. When I open the second window, it appears diagonally down but not hitting the bottom, and I can open a third window that way as well.

I'm interested to hear what other web browsers do. I have avoided Mozilla and Netscape and Opera because they seemed incomplete and slow, but I haven't tested with them in six months. I wanted to like Opera, but there were too many pages it could not render the way the designer intended, and it did SSL miserably. I assume that it is "better" now, but how much better?