for people who want things as normal and compatible as possible, the sad fact is you have to go for an ie shell.
95% of people use internet explorer and as such many sites only work properly in ie based browsers, because IE isn't w3c compliant.
as for the security issues. sure, myIE2 will have the same problems IE has. But only a fool would think other browsers are immune.
an exploit was discovered recently that affected ALL browsers... IE, Opera, Mozilla, Firefox etc and all had to be patched.
The beauty of Firefox is that a patch was released almost instantly. This may be the case with some other browsers too, but you can bet the IE patch took a while (dont even know if they have resolved this issue yet tbh)
as for mouse gestures in firefox, I suggest you go use
this. thats the one i use, and it comes with some nifty extras you might like.