New Chimera convert here
I used IE for X for the past year and because 10.1 wasn't very fast I just attributed IE's slowness to the OS. As soon as I got 10.2, IE started to drive me crazy because 10.2 sped everything up to OS9 levels, but IE is still a dog.
Chimera is fast and tabbed browsing is addictive (I didn't even know what it was 5 days ago and now I can't get enough). Tabbed browsing is especially good for small monitors and slower machines because it loads stuff in the background and does so without opening new windows. Chimera only crashed once on two computers in that time, while IE crashes every two hours. There are some pages that don't look quite right with chimera, but the only place I've really had trouble was when I went to the MS support page and there chimera couldn't handle the pages (MS probably does this on purpose, right?).
So you can probably use chimera (or mozilla) for 97% of what you do, but definitely keep a copy of IE around
JINX