I'm not sure I follow you. Is this just a matter of which rules you loaded for ipfw, or is there a kernel setting that just uses ipfw for bridging, without enabling the firewall. If so, I have never heard of this.
OTOH, if you have just loaded the minimal ruleset to do address translation, without firewall rules, well, that is more secure than NO firewall, but still, it allows network traffic on any port, from any IP address, in or out. The only security here is that no outside agent can know the internal address of your other workstations on the network. But, if any trojan virus infects a workstation, it can communicate to the outside world through any port it wants. Also, with a minimal ruleset, you are probably not doing any logging, which can help you identify when problems or attacks occur.
Consider it "halfway" secure. Not necessarily bad, but not exactly a locked fortress. -------------------------------------------
"Calculus is just the meaningless manipulation of higher symbols"
-unknown F student