The three most important applications for my computer use at home are, in order of importance:

Web Browser
Email Client
Instant Messaging Client

I am constantly re-evaluating which is the best software solution in each category. I know there are a lot of choices in both categories, but to simplify my life, I’ve whittled it down to either a solution by Apple Computer on one hand, or a particular Open Source solution on the other hand.

Web Browser
Apple solution: Safari
Open Source solution: Firefox
My Pick: Safari
Why:
Mozilla offers far more features than Safari, particularly through its plugin architecture. However, on my relatively slow Macs at home (the fastest is 450 MHz), it is unable to smoothly scroll through long pages of text and/or graphics. Safari is far superior in this area, so that’s what I use, despite the lack of features and extensibility. I should add that at work, my choice is Firefox… it performs much better on my 1.8 GHz Pentium 4, not to mention that my other choice is Internet Explorer. If Firefox was faster on scrolling with my slow Macs, I’d use it instead of Safari.

Email Client
Apple solution: Mail
Open Source solution: Thunderbird
My Pick: Mail
Why:
Both Mail and Thunderbird are excellent applications overall. Both are very fast at reading, composing, and searching for email messages. I feel that Thunderbird has a more evolved feature set than Mail, and I generally enjoy using it more. However, there is one small sticking point for me. It is a very, very petty point, and I know it will seem dumb, but… the Mac version of Thunderbird is currently unable to play a custom wav file to alert you when new mail arrives. It is only capable of using the currently-selected Mac OS beep sound. This is important to me because I don’t like to constantly visually check my email, so I have my email client running all the time, and it plays a custom alert sound when new mail arrives. None of the Mac OS X built-in alerts are sufficient for alerting me – they need to be long in duration and relatively distinct. Plus, I don’t want to have to set up my system beep in order to get the email alert I want. So, I choose Mail, which is quite capable of supporting custom mail alert sounds. Petty? Yes. Important for me? Yes. And my custom alert sound is Homer Simpson shouting “The mail! The mail is here! Ooh!” Gotta have it.

Instant Messaging Client
Apple solution: iChat
Open Source solution: AdiumX
My Pick: AdiumX
Why:
AdiumX has support for more than just AOL’s protocol; it can also connect to MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, ICQ, irc, Jabber, and a multitude of other services. You can have multiple IM accounts signed on at the same time. The contact list and message windows are themeable. It’s fast and lightweight. There are tons of other reasons, but suffice to say that AdiumX is the clear winner here.

Here’s a screenshot I took a while back showing the six different programs lined up side-by-side by way of Exposé:

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