For the phone, with a small screen, the ICS Stock browser is the best choice over all.
Yes, Chrome, Firefox, and HD all are pretty good, but realistically they all have some failings when used on a small screen. They are better suited to tablets.
Their problems: They all prefer to show you the full site, making you zoom in, and accidentally triggering links on busy pages, or they show you the "Mobile" pages on some sites. They are all huge, sucking up lots of memory. There is some evidence that merely having chrome on your device slows it down, at least this has been seen on some ICS tablets.
Full screen rendering of websites is seldom useful on small screens.
Yes, you can turn this off in some cases, but then the pages are equally uselss in the opposite direction, and you have to zoom out to read anything.
Stock browser seems to intelligently focus on what you want to read. Pick an item out of Google News, and it seems to automatically find the column on that page that has the text you want, and shifts the ads off screen. There if you want them, but 99% of the time you don't.
It also has a Read button on the top, that renders the text and nothing but the text in large print. A godsend for those sites that insist on imposing some ridiculously tiny font with some equally ridiculously long lines.
Stock's failing is hiding the tabs list on a tricky pulldown. (The quirky labs feature can help with tab switching, but then you lose the "Read" feature.
Stock is also slower than Firefox or Chrome, to say nothing about HD's new render engine. But the internet connection is slower than any browser, so having the fastest browser doesn't always help.
I still use Firefox occasionally, but Stock is my favorite.