Seriously, my experience is: I used IE for less than a month, back then in mid 90’s. Then gone for opera cause she did the things IE couldn’t. Memory handling was far better, so she was faster and more stable. For couple of years now I switched to firefox. Opera became too big and I just love all the extensions.

At that moment of switchng to FF I needed a mail client (for years I used Opera’s integrated one). So the choice was TB. It is nice. Big, stable and capable e-mail client. Actually, it could do much more things that I ever needed. I am not crazy about e-mails. Beside that, GMail was there, and I found it convenient to have them all everywhere I was. So, I dropped TB and gone to Google’s web based empire. But, if I needed robust desktop client, I would stick to TB.

While speaking about this… same situation was with office application. Open Office is nice application. It had some bugs last time I was with it but those were minor ones. I really don’t kow how it goes right now. I do have it installed but I don’t use it. Of the whole office package I need good text editor, and Abiword is just what I need. maybe you should give it a try. It is open-sourced and cross-platform just as all other apps.

And the just one more thing…. all of them, firefox, thinderbird and abiword can go live, that means you can use versions that needs no installation. They are bit slower so I’d recomend using regular installed apps, but those that goes live are perfect to put on USB flash and to carry with yourself. Sure that firefox can have extensions and bookmarks and everything that way They, and some other nicey apps, are here: http://portableapps.com/

Hope this helps.