You can get a skin for IE called MyIE (methinks). It's pretty good. Implements most of opera's features, includes pop-blocking and all the like. But what the heck. It's still IE.

I've been using Konqueror/Firefox for quite a while now. Firefox is pretty damn fast, at least under Linux (apparently, it's slower under Windows). Also, the new version of Konqueror in KDE 3.2 (I think that's the right version, whatever is the latest) is supposed to be at least as fast as Firefox, if not better. Not to mention its integration in the desktop...