For some reason, I've found IE to be more stable than Firefox on XP...not sure why. On Vista Firefox is more stable for me.
Firefox is better and that for a reason. If you're a web developer (like i'm) then you probably want to code your pages in web standards. But what do you know, IE DOESNT support them and probably never will. You may hear sometimes people say "This page works in IE and doesnt work in FF", but it's exactly the opposite. It doesnt work in IE and it looks the way it is supposed to look in FF. If you want to see the internet the way it is supposed to look, then i recommend using firefox. You dont believe me? Then i recommend reading this little page, which gives you detailed information about both browsers, including busted myths. www. webdevout. net / browser-support
I'm surprised that any webmasters are voting for IE, I always use firefox, and the new firefox 3 is not as slow as the old firefox was. The slow load time was my only complaint for firefox but it seems to be much faster in its latest version. The only reason I ever use IE is to check the appearance of my sites when I make a change. In the past I have made small html errors in the code and firefox was still able to display the page correctly but IE was not. This is why I always check any changes in both browsers.
I like Firefox better, but for webdesign, you want to use IE for testing purposes (since majority of users view your site through IE).