In general, I've been really happy with the Mac experience. I switched about. . . two years ago (wow, has it been two years since Ally fragged my PC laptop with a cup of tea? Huh, that's crazy), and in general am a much happier person because of it. Having a command line is just a vital part of the computer experience for a fellow like me (at this moment, I'm jumping between my blogger software and iTerm, setting up some backups of my mp3s and pictures using rsync), a lot of the applications are just wonderful to use (using Quicksilver, for instance, helps in my life's goal of never having to remove my keys from the keyboard, iTunes is super nice from a user-standpoint), and it's very very pretty.

But there are a couple of gaping holes in the applications that drive me batty. Like, a web browser that doesn't suck. There isn't one. Safari (packaged with the Mac OS) out of the box is terrible (anything that doesn't let me re-arrange my tabs is just not OK, and the fact that inline find isn't an option is just terrible. I'm led to understand that this will be available in the Leopard release, but should I have to wait that long? No). Firefox 2 is a memory beast, and since I made the terrible mistake of only getting a gig of ram in this puppy, memory is at a premium. Firefox just completely drags down my system. Lots of nice features, though. I've been using Camino for a while because for some reason it's really fast when used with GMail. But that's no good either (no tab re-arranging, no inline find, my bank site doesn't work with it).

Since I liked Firefox so much, I wanted to give Flock a try (which I haven't installed for over a year. As I understand it, Flock is a branch from the Firefox code base). They are just announcing their 1.0 Beta released, so I installed that tonight. It has a bunch of interesting features (native tight integration with a bunch of social apps: flickr, Facebook, blogging tools, etc). Which is kind of neat. I was hoping that it would get me involved with Facebook, since all the kids are using it and I hear it's the next big thing. And it was actually kind of nice. Until it crashed 10 minutes into my using it.

Alright, not a big deal. Until the next crash 5 minutes later. Tabbed browsing is really wonderful, but if you are going to have a single window interface to your application, you have to find a way to keep critical errors from knocking out ALL of the windows you have open, since that makes for an intolerable user experience.

So, I'm going to go ahead and put away Flock until the official 1.0 release, since I really don't want it crashing while I'm in the middle of writing a long post, or transferring money, or doing anything else.

And don't get me started on FTP clients. Yuch.