In my experience the most secure way to browse the net is to use firefox with noscript plugin, and use site advisor from McAfee. However doing this will NOT make you immune to viruses but will help protect you from some/most? malicious sites. You also need to apply common sense and follow basic security guidelines to prevent you from being infected by a trojan etc check out the forums on the majorgeeks site there you will find alot of info on helping to prevent your pc from being infected with malware.
IE9 is still in Beta,true,but i haven't come across any bugs yet and I would NOT use credit card on it.
Opera for me usually with 60+ open tabs on a real old system. Athlon 1800+/1 GB RAM (right now task manager shows 394 MB RAM used by Opera with 51 tabs) No other browser worked for me without crashes so far.
Chrome, used to be IE then since Chrome 2 or so never looked back. Use Adblock and a few other scripts/addons when I need to. Dont like FF, never did. Interface seemed to be a cheap rip off of IE to me and was slower than IE7 and IE8 at time for me but i'd say its improved since that
How can you divide your attention to so many tabs? It is like saying "My car can do 250 mph", but what is the point if a legal limit is 70 mph? sebus
I'm used to it, actually I resume my last open tabs each time I start it. I've been doing the same for 7 8 years now.
Firefox Id love to switch over to Chrome due to its speed but wont because it's extensions don't work right, atleast the ones i use. Adblock Plus (Official port) for one; Ads flash on page load And the biggest thing keeping me back is Firefox's "Awesome Bar". It's so much superior to what chrome offers, makes searching though your url's/history/bookmarks so much easier.
Honestly it really just comes down to what works best for the end user. What might work great for some people might not work the same for someone else. Many alternatives out today then say 5+ years ago. With that being said i've been using FF for quite some time. I tried Chrome but it made me emo with certain things not working correctly.
I don't know about security but I finally moved to Chrome for my default browser when its extension base filled my needs. I prefer how Chrome handles extensions to how FireFox handles them. But I keep Firefox around for Craizedlist and we all need IE for when nothing else works. IE seems to run anything and everything.