If you mean that you hate ActiveX while using IE, you can disable it, if you don't know how, post here, and I will post step-by-step on how to disable it in IE, if this is not what you meant, could you clarify?
I too hate IE, but I work for several mortgage companies, and IE is a must to use certain sites administration interfaces (MLS, GMAC, WAMU, etc etc etc), which I use to deal out credentials for loan officers, processors, and underwriters, etc. For everything else, Firefox works great.
What I do, is use firefox with the IETab plugin, which allows you to use IEs engine within a Firefox Tab (some sites when viewed this way make firefox cry(crash though).
Also the mortgage origination software my clients use (Encompass) uses embedded IE (along with .NET), so, IE is hard to get away from at work, but at home, for non-work, I use elinks (linux) for 99% of my web browsing.
Since I only go into the office 2 times a week (the rest I can do from home), my main client had to BUY me a machine (a deduction for them anyways) for home with WindowsXP on it, because I refused to install windows on any of my linux cluster nodes (partly because encompass and XP would run like crap on any of the nodes (sans my master node)).