1 It's faster than IE8. They say they use your GPU to accelerate rendering. Supposed to be more standards-compliant and such too. If you don't like the tabs being on the same row as the address bar (you'll see what I mean if you try it) you can right-click on that part of the window to get a menu option to change that behavior.

2

Overall, I like it.  It's a much cleaner interface, and they've done a better job of segregating each tab into its own sandbox, so a javascript error doesn't pull down the whole browser.  However, there are some issues/things to get used to.  Based on your previous posts, I think the biggest irritation you'll have is that they've moved stuff around quite a bit.  It took a few weeks to get used to the new locations of the favorites way off on the right, and I found myself hitting the "Home" button accidentally fairly often for a little while.  The search functionality has been integrated into the address bar, rather than having its own field.  That takes a little getting used to, as well.

I think the biggest irritation for me is that they tried to simplify the controls on the content filtering and crippled it--or maybe marketing won that battle.  I have a lot more ads that pop up that IE8's filtering used to take care of.  I don't know if you're still using Proximotron to cover down on that.

3 Yeah, I use Proxomitron for that.