IE7 seems like it will require you to have
WGA installed on your computer, this program wastes your resources by checking if you have a genuine version of windows everytime you restart.
Torpark, looks a heck of a lot more secure then both IE and the base version of firefox.
Also Java is platform independant, in otherwords it shouldn't matter what browser or Operating System you use. I'd recommend Firefox because simply working with Java and Javascript it tends to emulate applets a lot better/faster and doesn't ask you to debug someone elses code (of course that is an option that can be turned off in IE but still it's annoying).
If anyone is wondering how to speed up the execution (loading of) Internet Explorer, set your home page to "about:blank" without the quotations, I've found that it opens quicker then explorer, no joke.
Personally I have developed my own browser in VB using one of the dlls that Internet Explorer uses, without all the 'garbage' ontop IE can run very fast on a Windows machine because it is in-built but the latest versions of IE to me aren't that spectacular when compared to firefox... Also firefox can emulate running IE with an extension called IE Tab however I am yet to see something similar for IE to emulate other browsers, trust me it is a great tool when you are developing webpages to be able to see what they look like in different browser environments.
*NB by emulate I mean in the sense of running a similar process and achieving the same effect of, not by the IT definition.
Just to add, if I want to know something about Firefox, there is no searching for it in the GUI, I can just simply type "about

lugins", "about:config", "about:mozilla" or just simply "about:" into the url field.