Chrome, opera, firefox, and safari are all great browsers.
I use firefox right now, but I used to use Opera all the time. Can't remember when or why I switched though. I think it preferred the default look of firefox, since they all felt snappy enough to me. But I can DEFINITELY feel the IE is slower.
Since I don't use IE much, I can't comment on security, but from the posts here, it looks like that's a big one too.