Mozilla vs. iGoogle – Which will be our personal agent?

Anybody that knows me, knows that I’m a huge supporter of Mozilla, especially Thunderbird. However, after 18 months of wishful thinking, I had to make a change this week; out with Mozilla (Thunderbird) and in with iGoogle and Gmail. I stuck with Thunderbird for a long time because of its unbelievable ease of use, consistency, and open source upgrades all driven by its non-profit culture. I also hoped that they would merge Firefox with Thunderbird and create the all in one application suite they’ve always talked about. Got so pumped up last year when they finally released the Lightning add-on for Thunderbird. However, waiting became too inefficient and switching to iGoogle/Gmail this week has been nothing short of a spiritual experience. Of course, I still use Firefox, but with the new Google setup, I don’t ever need to close the browser.

Here’s how my web worker life has transitioned:

Before the switch I used:

1) Thunderbird – email, RSS, calendar

2) Microsoft Office – document creation

3) Firefox / iGoogle – customized browser homepage

4) Skype – chat and rare calls to London

Now, it’s as simple as this:

1) Firefox Browser / iGoogle Homepage

a) Gmail

b) Calendar

c) Docs (unbelievable for collaboration)

d) Reader (RSS)

e) Gchat (in both Gmail and Docs)

Congratulations to Google for growing from their link expert roots into functional and aesthetic UE geniuses. The only thing that seems to be missing is a SVN dev environment, which I’m sure is in the works. I still have big hopes for Mozilla, but it’s going to take some time before they have the unified personal agent for the consumer — Google is there and is about to take over the world for real. Don’t count Mozilla out though; with all the suits moving into Google corporate and Mozilla having their clever 501(c)(3), look for some interesting things from them in the new creative capitalism.

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