Being satisfied and seeing room for improvement are two different things. Firefox has not ever previously left me satisfied. I was looking for a replacement the day after I started using it. It took a while for the alternatives to become less painful.

I was, until the problems I've mentioned before came up, satisfied with Safari 3. Lightroom fits the bill. Apple's own Mail until Leopard. Squeeze Center. Quite a lot of other software in fact. Some software one might be satisfied with at one point and then grow out of favor with for whatever reasons.

Choice isn't bad, but there are bad choices. I don't think any piece of software needs to have 99% of the extensions and add-ons available for Firefox to be successful. And I do think Google will be able to eat a significant share of FF market with or without extensions or an extension repository.

I can see the points Tony has made with regards to IE. I suppose I'm more elitist when it comes to web compatibility. Using a Mac I'll don't have an option of loading IE in any way shape or form natively, so it's not an issue I have to personally manage. I'm also fortunate in that I don't visit any sites that require, recommend or even work better with IE.

For me, it's almost all web-enable firmwares for networking appliances that make me have to use IE.

And I can't believe you like(d) Mail.app. Probably the worst email client I've ever used. Except maybe Eudora.

I'll tell you about one I hated: Thunderbird. Damn, what a pile of crap when I tried it in 2004 and again in 2005. Haven't tried it since though, so it might be amazing by now.

I used to use Agent (also a news reader) in Windows a long long time ago and then The Bat. I can't stand Outlook (used it for some 8 years at work), Outlook express was (and is) a complete joke and Eudora has always been a PITA on all platforms - that was on my ban list 15 years ago.

I can think of things I'd change and add to Mail, but right now the only thing that pisses me off day to day is the instability and slow speed introduced with Leopard.

I'm okay with Outlook assuming you've kept it patched and turned off some of the dumb defaults like HTML email.

I've tried Chrome finally and currently it doesn't have anything that'll make me switch from FF3. I can't make it work with Cisco SDM/ASDM either which is a tad annoying.

Ah, those were the good old days. I *loved* Agent.

I think I kept using it for years after it no longer became really feasible to do so. It was text-only, so if I wanted to see rich-content emails I had to save them as HTML and open them with the browser. But oh did I love it.

I think I finally stopped using it around 2004/2005, when I switched completely over to gmail and didn't need a POP3 reader any more.

I use Thunderbird day-to-day. It has a lot of faults, but it's straightforward and simple.

The thing that pisses me off most about Mail.app is that it decides that it needs to combine all of my Inboxes into one view. I really don't want my personal mail mixed up with my work mail. Yes, I know that it doesn't "save" it that way, but I still want to keep my lives separate.

You're right that Outlook is a piece of garbage, though. I'm forced to use it for corporate calendaring. My main complaint with it is it defaults to horrible-netiquette mode, encouraging everyone to quote and forward wildly improperly. (Someone should write a virus that fixes people's Outlook settings.) My favorite new bug is that if you send to an Exchange mailing list, it goes ahead and expands it into all the individual users. So if you're trying to search for that email you sent to a group; too bad.

Surprisingly, I end up using MS Entourage as my MacOS mail client. It has a few things that bother me, but it mostly does things the way I want or lets me easily change its behavior with easy-to-find options. (Someone on MS's Mac UI team really needs to have a talk with folks over at the Windows UI team.)

When I started using Mail (see below) I found it had everything that I first liked about Thunderbird without any of the stuff I didn't.



I wouldn't stand for that problem either. But Mail doesn't do that. At least not in the past two OS versions. When I said I used Mail I didn't mean to imply I have always used it. I found it pretty craptastic up until the version in Mac OS 10.4 Tiger. As a matter of fact, while I was running Mac OS 10.3 Panther on my then new PowerBook, I still kept The Bat running on my Windows machine as my primary mail client.

Getting fed up with having to use the other machine for Mail I then switched to Thunderbird for a little while but then when I started using develo seeds pment of Tiger (remember where I worked and that I was also testing stuff I was designing on this machine) I switched over to Mail.

Anyway, back to the gripe... "INBOX" is a meta object with a disclosure triangle to its left, just like every other "Mailbox," including Sent and Deleted. Flipping the triangle reveals all the unique Inboxes of all your accounts (you can name each one whatever you want). I always have the triangle flipped so I can see each inbox. I don't do this for the other mailboxes though except for on a special occasion when searching for something.

I can't recall if the UI design you describe was in the 10.3 version of Mail or even an earlier version. I do know that I disliked earlier versions enough to not even consider them. I didn't even consider Mac OS as a primary platform until 10.3. 10 and 10.1 I'd even consider technology previews. Anything below that wasn't even a proper OS and not worth my time except for my paycheck.

It seems the Mac OS version of Google's Chrome will likely only debut well into the Windows beta cycle, with no mention of how far away that might be. Let's hope a significant amount of time and effort are spent polishing everything up so it behaves like a proper OS citizen while the backbone of the app receives the must-have features everyone on every platform is sure to request.

I use Thunderbird, and have three separate inboxes -- one for general email (me), and one each for the Linux-IDE and Linux-Kernel mailing lists.

By default it has a single screen with all three down the left side, but right-click and open on anything gives a new window for it.

Cheers

I am now using Foxmarks but I wish google would have updated browser sync for firefox 3 it was much better.

Other than taking a bite out of the billion or so dollars a year that Microsoft takes in selling its Windows OS, you mean?

tanstaafl.

Doug, I think you need an economics refresher course.

If you give something away for free, it doesn't matter if the consumers used to pay for it; you're still getting nothing. The only reason to do that is to drive the other company out of business, and that is illegal; it's called dumping or predatory pricing.

Of course, even that ignores the fact that 95% of Windows users get their copy of Windows with their computer. That's just not going to change, and MS would still get paid via that avenue. I suppose Google might be able to get a vendor to offer GoogleOS on their systems, but, again, I don't see any real advantage for them in that sort of development expenditure.

Edit: Okay, I just looked back, and despite the fact that I could have sworn you said free at some point, you did not. So I take it back. But Google currently doesn't charge for anything other than advertising, AFAIK, and I doubt they would change their business model that significantly.

What is Google going to add to its own OS to make people want to buy it? They've got gOS already but thats a Ubuntu Linux variant and free.

Oops. Well ignore that bit then

Somebody told me it was.

It would probably take a billion dollars to develop and market a new OS. That still wouldn't guarantee any significant market share even if the price were $1 per installation. It would probably take another billion or at least several hundred million to get a lot of great applications ported to it without said marketshare.

They could do it, but it would likely be more of a bespoke/vanity sort of thing. I don't know if they could really make it fly for the masses.

They'd likely have a better chance of creating a site to compete with eBay. And I don't think that could be done even by a Google-Microsoft-Amazon-Yahoo consortium.

Or Apple. I was thinking about this the other day. Apple does make a lot of money on the Mac hardware they sell, but they also now have a growing non Mac market with the iPod, and iPhone. Plus they also have 18 billion in the bank. So, they now have a good setup to at least experiment with the idea of releasing their OS to a wider market. It doesn't have to be built to work on every system out there nor sold in retail. Instead, they can release a hardware spec list, similar to what Microsoft does, and license the OS to a few other OEMs like HP or Dell. Think of it like the HP branded iPod deal, but letting the other OEM do more of the hardware part.

They did do that before and it didn't turn out so well. As you point out, they have other significant sources of revenue now, so it might turn out differently this time, but I'm inclined to say they'd still be gunshy. Now that I think of it, they recently sued Psystar.

A Google OS makes some competitive sense for them as a loss-leader for the other Google products, particularly as a response to Microsoft's attempts to "embrace and extend" search and tie it to the desktop.

Google's first shipping consumer OS will be Android, of course. Whether they push anywhere beyond that remains to be seen.