Browser wars, you gotta love them...
I'm with IceFire here. Pretty much everything else is better than Internet Explorer (6), and IE7 only fixed the most glaring problems so I consider it a broken browser still. The fact that many sites lick Microsoft's boots and break their pages so that they work with IE doesn't make it a valid argument for not using a standards-compliant browser. If you want to see just how broken IE is, visit the
ACID2 test and see how your browser of choice mutilates the image rather valiantly...
I used Opera for a long time, started having some problems with it using 100% processor capacity starging from some whatever version, and then moved to Firefox and after configuring some add-ons (mouse gestures, NoScript, AdBlockPlus and a few others), Firefox 3 is in general the best browser I've used. I still use Opera (latest versions don't have the aforementioned CPU resource problem) for some things, but FF3 is my primary browser.
Also, talking about malware; I doubt IE has any, though some could consider that abortion of a program a malware in itself, but it certainly does make your PC more vulnerable to spyware, malware and other not so nice stuff... more so than by using Opera, Firefox or other browsers anyway.
On the topic of toolbars I have nothing good to say. Frakking insidious bastards of programs, embedding themselves into startup procedurs and slowing mah system boot down. What I hate the most are installers that helpfully make stuff like google toolbar power up on startup, without explicitely telling me so. I have never met a toolbar that would be actually needed or useful in any way. Blegh.
The only purpose I ever use IE for is updating Windows manually. That's the only thing I need it for... In fact the only reason I stick to Windows at all is that while it sucks to be dependant of a multinational corporation that seems to like doing it wrong on so many things is that other options are, at the moment, not viable for me. I wouldn't get a Mac if you paid me (well, I would, but I would sell it away as soon as I could) because Apple is more or less the same, except their stuff works marginally better and pays a lot more per performance. Linux distros, well, cursed be hardware manufacturers for not releasing specs or opening their driver sources altogether. As soon as things work sufficiently on the Linux side, I'll go there, but at the moment it's way too much of a hassle.
</rant>