Perris may I not be agree with you?
1) Internet Explorer runs on iexplorer process and not on explorer process, you don't save anything in matter of resources thinking that being SO built in, it' one of the most resource hungry browser as all Microsoft products
2) Different browser speed is there, google it and you will see nice comparatives, because every browser it has it's own core which interprets the code, the speed is not given by the transfer speed but to rendering the code
3) flexibility of the ie is nearly null
4) security, I would doubt even I didn't experimented myself but having Windows in background says everything for me
of course you can disagree with me
launch task manager, cold start ie and firefox, see which one uses more processor, which uses more memory, on my box firefox uses quite a bit more of everything
then as you suggested I did an internet search and pulled up the very first google result using "fastest browser" as my search term, came up with
thisunless I am reading that wrong, ie is crushing firefox on every thing that concerns me;
Opera also is a clear winner using history. In fact, on Linux it is faster than Mozilla and Firefox for all except starting time. On Mac and Windows, Opera is faster than Mozilla and Firefox for all tasks. Surprisingly, Mozilla is faster at most tasks than Firefox (please don't send me any more emails about this line, I am well aware of why it is faster). Internet Explorer on Windows was either as fast as - or faster than Mozilla and Firefox for most tasks
btw, I don't know why this page has no google chrome but I'm pretty sure that would be faster then ie and firefox but not as fast as opera
so I wanted to see everything comparing to chrome so I searched and used the first result
againhere chrome is doing better then everything with firefox pretty much losing to everything
as far as configuration, firefox does have a bunch of themes which is nice but I just love how I can configure ie better, that I guess is individual preferance
and I did not "shop" for a page that I would like I simply used the very first result on a google search, I'm sure you can find pages that boast each browser is best with their respecitve "benchmarks" proving it, the thing is firefox seems to promote "their browser is the best" more then anyone else and it seems like it's not even close
I think it comes down to this;
"whichever you like is the best"
it's all what you like when it comes to browsers