I have Firefox and the Avant Browser which is IE with more bells and whistles. I prefer Avant over Firefox. I tried Maxthon but could not get it to work properly. Firefox I believe is the securest of the various browsers I have tried.
Stop supporting IE? I think you heard wrong.
The word from Microsoft is that IE6 SP2 is the final version of IE, and from now on, new versions of IE will come with each new operating system. If you want IE7, you'll have to shell out for Longhorn, the codename for Microsoft's next OS.
Microsoft is saying that if you want new IE features, there are third parties using IE's plugin system to code them, and you can download those.