Because it is the only browser that is not tied hand-and-foot to some major global commercial player, and because each and every browser ever launched had security issues.
If you had taken a moment to actually scan those search results, you would have realized that "Chrome is the new IE" is typically a reference to its ubiquity.
Safari and Firefox is typically called the new IE because they are lagging behind the times.
Which is why I said "IE6" in my original comment. The later versions of IE were very decent. They certainly didn't seem like the frozen accident of history - an issue Firefox continues to grapple with.
Umm, no. See Firefox gives no one any reason to hate it based on idealogy. It's a pro-consumer, pro-internet user, privacy-respecting, standards-compliant browser. What is not to love in this ideology?
All the same, as of 2015, it is a poor implementation of a browser from the technical point of view. Not because it was designed badly, but because it has simply not kept up.
