Sorry if you are aware of this already but you are not constrained to have only one internet browser at a time on your machine. They are completely independent programs and you can have Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera (and any other internet browser you care to name) installed on your machine, and can run then all at the same time if you so choose. There is no conflict between them. I personally have about a dozen different browsers installed , mostly to have a play around to see whether they are worth bothering with, and sometimes have 3 of then running simultaneously.
Each of them will prompt you for whether or not you want that particular program to be the default internet browser for your machine and, of course, there can only be one default but you can run all of them together if you so choose.
So don't feel constrained to only having Internet Explorer on your computer.