I have been using Firefox by Mozilla for a week now, and really love it. It’s fast on my pokey 266mhz Windows98 laptop, and amazing on my 2.4ghz XPpro machine. It has most of the features of Opera, such as popup blocking and tabbed layout, but it seems more lightweight and streamlined. I don’t need Opera’s chat feature or mail client, and if I can save some vertical space by not dealing with the ads, that is a bonus too. (especially on my 800x600 laptop)
I am also now using Thunderbird by Mozilla for my email client. My server is configured as IMAP4, so I can pretty much use any client I want and get the same experience. (Except perhaps Opera, which seems to have a couple issues with IMAP at the moment) Like it’s counterpart, Firefox, Thunderbird is a stripped-down app, and runs fast and doesn’t have all the bells and whistles. Just simple, clean design, and great performance. I used to use Mozilla 1.7 for email, which is very similar, but figured I’d get rid of the Mozilla “suite” and do Firefox/Thunderbird instead. Mozilla has a chat feature, I think, and html composer which I will never use, so why install it?
I am running Outlook (the big version, not Express) on my desktop for email, calendar, and notes because it sync’s with my PocketPC. I wish there was an easy way to have the calendar, contacts and notes (for PC) kept remotely, just like I keep my email on the IMAP server. That would simplify syncing between computers a lot… There is an extension for Mozilla that let’s you add a calendar, and it uses the iCal standard, and I should be able to configure my server to host it. Then I will be able to connect to it from any of my computers. But I will need to find an app for my PocketPC…