Software you use are generally limited by your operating system. Let me start by saying that I mostly use Windows XP and Windows 2003 which are quite similar in terms of which software you can use with them. Why am I not using some linux distribution like Ubuntu? Mainly because I am playing recent games which are not fully supported by API translators like Wine or Cedega. However, I always have a VMware Ubuntu image on my desktop to play with.
Browser
The first time I accessed the web was with the AOL browser. I have to say that it was quite a painfull experience but I had no choice. AOL was the only internet provider in my area. That did not last much longer than the trial period. Next, there was Internet Explorer. It was part of Windows and was quite easy to use. I remember installing Netscape once or twice during that period but I did not like it because it was slow. In 2003 and 2004, I tried Opera for a while. I liked the intuitive interface and how fast it was loading pages. What impressed me the most at that time was the mouse gestures feature available with Opera. If you are a heavy web surfer, I can only recommend that you have a look at them.
Not long after that, I was introduced to Firefox 0.9. What drove me from Opera to Firefox is the ability to easily customize and extends Firefox through user developed add-ons. It’s a shame that Opera still does not offer something similar to this date. Firefox is my day-to-day browser. It’s robust, it’s simple, it has a good standard compliance and it’s powerfull. I’m currently using Adblock Plus to block ads, NoScript to block unwanted scripts, applet, flash and video, Web Developer to inspect web content and Firebug to debug javascript, css and html. With this flexibility, I think it will take a lot to make me leave Firefox.
Email client
My first email client was Eudora Light by Qualcomm. It was great but I quickly moved to the Pro version with more features. There is not much to say about it. The reason I dropped it was because it did not support UTF-8 and I started receiving emails that used that encoding. Not being able to read your email is a pretty good reason to change your client. I quickly discovered Thunderbird. Being developed by the same guys that are developing Firefox is surely a plus. It also support user developed add-ons to extend it but I am not using any at the moment. I used to sign and encrypt my mail using GnuPG with an add-on but I can’t remember its name.
At different moments in my life, I though about going all the way with a web based email client like Hotmail, Gmail or SquirrelMail. I had my plans for doing it. I created my hotmail account once and though I would kept it for life but I forgot to sign in for a period during one of my travels and I lost my account. An other painfull experience. Nowadays, I am tracking five different email accounts and some rss feeds. It’s just easier and more convenient to use Thunderbird in this case. Most of these accounts have a web based access that I can rely on when I am not home.
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