A little background history

Most of my life I was with IE until like 2007 or something, moved on to FF, and in the past year or so, Chrome.

Something stupid happened with Chrome in December and I know it was a patch update because the control panel symbol changed and I kept getting asked for log in info (which btw is awesome for multiple comps), however Chrome became slow, slow, slow and in Jan there was another update that made it even worse.

I decided to have a look at IE9, something I only ever opened after a fresh OS install to install Chrome and it turned out to be faster, just lacked add ons. IE10 for Win7 came out recently or so I believe and speed has gone to awesome levels, its rather ironic how IE has gotten so fast considering how terrible it once was. The new spell check, other features and super fast loading made it a great choice, sadly MS have gone on a "NO EXTENSIONS" path and it seems based on the examples I have seen making add ons is going to be a pain the COM ass.

It is a shame really, it would have been cool making add ons or at least having access to them. Anyway I only use 2 add ons, NotScript / AdBlock and there isnt a suitable (free) alternative in IE.

I cant really bare with the poor performance of Chrome (32 seconds to load a .gov site, vs IE10 <1s wtf?) and I dont think its the add ons either, since things were super smooth last year. Oh and this is a fresh install of the comp ;)

/Rant off

Is there a browser out there that is just as fast as IE (never thought I would ever say that) but has the features of Chrome?

Why haven't you tried Firefox again?

I never had trouble with it, and every add-on you can imagine will be available.

Also, I fell much safer on FF about the information being collected from my computer while browsing.

About IE... I hope they lost their pride and downloaded FF source code and improved their product. It was about time

I use Opera for pretty much everything, but I've also learned that no browser is perfect, so I often toggle between Opera and SRWare's Iron (which is based on the open source Chromium - so it's basically Chrome without the Google tracking code :) )

I agree with Kuramayoko10, I use FF for 99% of the time when I have a choice (my work machine has only IE and anything else is either blocked or auto-uninstalls).

In the one other percent I use Opera for one aspect of a particluar online game because of the way it lets you set tabbing macros makes one aspect of that game soooo nice.

Never had any perf issues with Chrome, though it's worth noting that all the browsers swing pretty wildly on the perf spectrum per feature in every release. It can chew up memory if you've got a lot of tabs open, but I suppose that's true of any browser.

Forget ad block and go with a HOSTS file (stick in windows\system32\drivers\etc).

Anyway, I strongly second Opera.

It has the smoothest bookmark addition and management of any of the browsers.

You can set plugins(like flash) to load on demand. So instead of downloading all of that junk, you just get a little box in your browser that you can click on *if* you want that flash object loaded(like a YouTube video).

It's a breeze to make custom settings to particular websites. You can change everything from how ads and popups are treated, to what types of javascript is added/allowed and cookies,plugins basically everything.

Then there are mouse gestures which can be assigned to common tasks.

It's great at resuming downloads. Firefox finally added that ability, but I've found Opera has fewer issues with continuing broken downloads.

It has a handy built in zoom feature. So you can zoom in and out of a webpage with a scroll bar at the bottom of the browser, or using Ctrl+up/down.

I'm another Opera fan. I use it for browsing, email, IRC, and torrenting.

Opera used to be my main browser for two years, and I moved to Chrome. Honestly I can't remember why I left Opera in the first place, because it was serving me so well. I think it was for development reasons.

Forget ad block and go with a HOSTS file (stick in windows\system32\drivers\etc).

Oh my, that was perfect

I knew GD wouldnt let me down :D

Forget ad block and go with a HOSTS file :) (stick in windows\system32\drivers\etc).

Last time I tried, it didn't handle youtube ads and other complex advertising media on its own, though.

I use Chromium, and also sometimes Lynx (which is pretty awesome for SSH proxying).