Firefox is faster, safer and more customizable than Ieplorer. With Firefox you can load up several things symultaniously rather than one by one like explorer does.
Don't tell me you only had one IE window up at a time. Even the slowest connection(like my old one) will still run with little slowdown if you have more than one window open. And with DSL, I can load as many windows as I want without slowdown. I have three windows open at the time of writing and I'm still going fast.