Why is IE so bad? If you're thinking of saying "security" you might want to think again. Secunia has logged 67 vulnerabilities for IE9 in 2012, compared to far more than that for Firefox (I stopped counting once the sum was greater than 67).
Mozilla also doesn't bother patching anything but the latest version of Firefox. Not sure about you but I'd rather not have Facebook integrated into my browser, especially given their recent account information sales snafu.
I would have to check my facts here, but it certainly used to be the case that Microsoft took longer to fix vulnerabilities than the makers of other major browsers. If you factor that in to the overall security to a product (a longer period of time for a vulnerability to remain unpatched), it alters things quite a bit. However, as I said, I would need to check what the response times are nowadays.
- edit - I just read the secunia browser comparison, it looks like MS have improved somewhat. Have you seen the amount of Chrome vulnerabilities when you criticised Firefox? I thought Firefox's was high but Chrome's knocks it out the park! If you're going to argue on this point then you should be recommending Opera, according to these stats.
Facebook integration in Firefox? None here, I don't ever remember seeing any anywhere... are you sure that you didn't have some add-on installed?
Also, I'm fairly sure Google only patches the latest version of Chrome, but you don't seem to have a problem with that either:
To the OP, I personally use Chrome on my systems, with IE as my go-to fallback. All three will do well for browsing (there are very few sites that break any more, and if they do, I'd say blame the site dev for breaking things).
I was reading something the other day talking about the most exploited products. Java took 56% of the list, followed by Adobe Flash Player and Adobe Reader. That tells me that it isn't so much about which browser you use these days but how secure its configuration is. Which is why I only have one plug-in installed and NoScript