Regardless, FF is 2nd fiddle, and only then because fuxty million wanna be geeks are on the open source bandwagon. If you want alternative go Opera - it has pretty much all the nice touches you need, paste & go, mouse gestures, speed dial etc native.
Agreed: Opera kicks firefoxs ass any day.
Youre all about the speed nexus.
Lets think about this.
Firefox = naked, you pretty much have to install a bajillionty extensions to have it do all of the set of things that either IE provides, or you just generally use on the web. When you do this its resource footprint goes through the roof. With 8 tabs open its footprint rockets up.
Opera = Fully featured and supports user addons and greasemonkey out of the box. It loads just as fast with a memory footprint considerably less that firefox.
IE = does everything I need, and the integration within the OS is beautiful, I just shove an address into the address bar of any window and whammo... im on the web. You say its slow and clunky, I say having to go through my program files when I can just hit Win+R "iexplore" and be on the net within 7 seconds is pretty damn fast actually.
Youre all about the plugins... I use IEPro its free, and introduces pretty much everything that Id want. Spell checking, flashblocking, support for greasemonkey, session restore, session history, and a billion other features I turn off cause I dont use them.
1 browser, 1 extension... IE.
If I wanted anything else Id go Opera.