First off, IE sucks. Too slow, too bloated, too insecure, lacks too many features… it’s just crap.
I haven’t tried Opera in years so I have no opinion on the newer versions. The older ones seemed nice enough though, so I imagine it’s still not bad.
To date, I have yet to see Safari work and any browser that crashes on launch is bad in my book. Even if you get it to run, it’s practically an older version of Chrome (same engine) so there is no net gain; Chrome is just as fast and actually runs on my machine. I leave Safari to Apple and disregard it as viable for PCs.
Chrome is good if you just want a fast, light, basic browser with no bells or whistles. However, if you like things like bookmarks, adblockers, preferences, or anything fancy then look elsewhere. It’s made to be lean and mean, and that is exactly what it is. There are also incompatibilities with certain sites as most are written for IE and/or Firefox only.
Then there is Firefox. Not the fastest browser (though it’s only slightly slower; not enough to really matter unless you care about bragging and are willing to sacrifice many other things to load 0.05 seconds quicker) and it can take up a bit of RAM (compared to Chrome at least), but if you have the right add-ons, the web is your beeyotch.
It’s safer, more customizable, more powerful, and basically just plain old gets things done…. whatever those things might be. One-click video downloads? No problem. FTP transfers? Piece of cake. Custom script/image blocking? Easy. Anything you want to do, FF will do it.