I consider Opera to be a much nicer, faster alternative to either IE or Firefox. I've been using Opera for several years. I don't use the integrated email but did try it. lIke most things, something new is hard to get used to.
The "Mouse Gestures" in Opera are something that is so intuitive, I find myself using them in every program I open. Of course, they don't work but that doesn't stop me from swiping my mouse all over the place. I absolutely never use the button bar in Opera and sometimes wonder why it's there. It has voice recognition, as well as it will read pages aloud which is nice when it's late and you're not really in the mood to sit there staring at the screen. It does translation from the right click menu. It's faster by a longshot than IE or Firefox. If I'd say it has any weakness, it's the way some plugins work and the fact that Style Sheets are written for the bass-akward Microsoft interpretation and so some pages using CSS don't layout right, but it's rare.
http://www.opera.com
Oh, and saving settings in Opera means only copying the Opera folder from $home/application data/Opera. From there, it remembers all your passwords, all your site preferences, logins, favorites, history, etc. It also has a new feature for saving your settings and moving them from machine to machine automatically. I don't use this though so I can't say.
I use Opera on WIndows XP/ WIn98 and 3 flavors of Linux. Settings move from OS to OS just as easily.