I'm not kidding, and I am not an MS fanboi. I truely like the layout of IE 7. While it may not look pretty, everything that you need is right in front of you. In my opinion, it blows Firefox out of the water, in terms of useability. The RSS setup is so much nicer than the "live bookmarks" in FF. Also, the search bar allows you to choose from multiple search engines on the fly. In addition, pulling up and hiding your "favorites" menu is a breeze in IE7.
Have you tried it yet? If not, I'd suggest trying it, if you have access to a Windows machine.