meltbanana314 said:
Try both and see what works for you. Entourage/Outlook and Thunderbird are two completely different beasts. Thunderbird is a simple, open source mail and newsreader application based off of Netscape, and Entourage/Outlook is a fully featured (bloated and insecure) personal information manager from an illegal monopoly. You choose. =)
Both are easy to use, but Mail is OS X native (therefore it looks and behaves like a natural Mac application) unlike Thunderbird which is a port from Win32/Linux. Plus, Mail has built in integration with Address Book and iCal - Thunderbird doesn't.
Okay, I think I'll give Mail a go and won't bother installing Thunderbird. If entourage is anything like Outlook I won't bother to use it, but have it anyway as part of office. I have tried out Outlook 2002 and then Outlook 2003 on the PC and both have not been good experiences. It may be fully featured but most of that stuff is unecessary. Besides we have the trusty little iCal app. I like your definition "a fully featured (bloated and insecure) personal information manager from an illegal monopoly"
About the browsers, I like the look and feel of Safari since it is a natural Mac app. However it is very simple compared to firefox - no where near the functionality and customizeability of firefox.
For instance, it doesn't have a button to open a new tab, and you can't customize the toolbar. And firefox has got heaps of extensions to use that are really useful (ie mouse gestures)
However firefox is not designed as a natural mac app in mind. When you click bookmarks for example, you just get a plain black and white menu without any icons for the bookmarks like you do in windows firefox (or like safari which has an icon next to each bookmark). Another good comparison is if you go to
www.google.com on both browsers, you can see that in safari, the radio buttons look nice and the "google search" button looks 3D-ish with rounded edges whereas in firefox, they are just rectangular and look flat.
Is there any way to improve the way firefox renders web page views to look better (ie like safari) and to make it have the mac "look and feel"
Or is there a new version of safari or another native mac app that is on par with firefox in functionality?