Locked down IE still not as good as Firefox?

If you don´t want to worry too much about security, Opera and Firefox are better choices IMO. There are less known holes in these browsers and they are also less targeted, probably also because of a smaller market share.

But if you (fore some reason) want to continue to use IE as your main browser, I would not worry too much if you have taken the right measures. At the moment I feel pretty secure browsing the web with Maxthon.

My security setup:

"Run Maxthon/IE in Limited User Mode"
"Internet Zone/Local Machine Zone locked down"
"Disabled dangerous ActiveX Controls"
"Disabled dangerous URL protocol handlers"
"Disabled HTML Application shell"
"Disabled Windows Script Host"