[mrnoodle]

It was with a seething hatred of anything Microsoft and a wide open mind that I installed Firefox and Thunderbird. Some little voice in the back of my mind kept me from deleting IE, though. I'm glad I didn't.

Every time I went to a new site, I'd get a message about some kind of new plugin I needed to download. Of course, that's to be expected if you're starting out fresh. However what I didn't expect was the molasses-slow downloads (like 2kb/sec) and the buggy installs. Well, buggy is misleading -- I never got them to work, period.

Thunderbird looked okay, but it doesn't like google mail for some reason.

I dunno. I guess the point is that while Firefox might blow IE out of the water in any number of metrics, for the stuff I do -- casual browsing -- it's more hassle than it's worth.

Uses a boatload of memory, too. I wouldn't notice if I got more memory, which I need to do anyway. But somehow I think my browser shouldn't be the determining factor of whether or not I need more memory.

I am prepared to accept the fact that the reason FF didn't work for me is because I'm a noob.