After at least 2 years of being faithful to Mozilla's Thunderbird email client, I am switching to Apple's Mail. This might be temporary if Mozilla comes out with a universal binary soon, but Mail is just so much faster. Thunderbird takes a while to launch and even longer to display messages that have already been downloaded. This is because Thunderbird for Mac is still a PPC application and has yet to make its debut as a UB. Chances are there is a beta UB in the works, as I am using a beta UB of Firefox, dubbed v1.5.0.2, right now.

I decided just to test out how fast Mail was, so I created my mail.gatech.edu account in Mail, configured all the necessary server settings like TLS and SSL then was ready to test it out. I timed Mail from how long it took after clicking the dock icon to the time the application loaded and the window came up. Less than 2 seconds - I'm talking instantaneous. It had loaded, connected to the gatech.edu mail server and checked for new mail insanely fast. It took Thunderbird 17 seconds to do the exact same. I rest my case.

Mail had not really taken my fancy previously, but I have taken to heart the sleek design. It is made to be a small application, window-size wise, so it's not a resolution real estate hog. Thunderbird, even squished to its limits, takes up more space. Now I have to find some nice Mail icons.