I just installed it, it does seem a bit faster than Firefox. I was surprised to find that it's just as up-to-date as well. HTML5 video (with WebM), Firefox Sync, SPDY, Opus... I half expected it to be horribly outdated, but it's a perfectly usable modern browser. I think I'll be keeping it around.

PGP is good if you want accountability, but I think OTR may be a better way to go here, at least for casual conversation.