Measuring a few browsers around, I have to say that
IE9
does run better than IE8. Nothing else about it.
Firefox is my everlasting browser of choice, but it's only good at more or less acceptable computers - it's hungry as heck on the CPU.
Chrome is fast, standard-compliant but not feature-rich enough, it's a pure WTF to a new user. If you can get used to it, lucky you.
Konqueror is doing well, but I don't like it generally, hard to get Flash working with it (if possible at all).
Opera does well enough, but it has too many features most of which are useless. That's all I've to say about browser. A few words about OSes:
Windows 7 is epic, the best Windows so far, great job compared to Vista, but too hungry on the RAM and HD space. XP is still doing well.
Mac OS X is fine but I don't like it, not my style, altough it looks amazingly nice.
Ubuntu has turned into something ridiculous,
Fedora 13 won't even boot anymore (F12 did do fine for me).
SUSE is being weird with sound, otherwise fine.
LinuxMint is what Ubuntu is supposed to be, generally, and is my current OS, alongside with WinXP.
Man, that was a long message.