I was a very long time PC user. I’ve been a loyal Microsoft guy since my first Dell desktop that I picked up back in 1991. At the beginning of 2009 I was swayed by the impressive performance of my iPod and my iPhone, so I decided to give a Mac a try and quickly fell in love with it. Since I was going to be use it at work, which is a sea of PC’s, I needed to be able to keep up with everyone and not miss a beat. I picked up a copy of Microsoft Office 08 for Mac and away I went.
The first big hiccup was with my email. Where is Outlook? What the hell is this Entourage program? Well after the challenge of transferring all of my email from Outlook on my PC to Entourage on the Mac, it seemed pretty easy to use. If you know what you are doing with Outlook, then Entourage should come pretty easy.
Since I was now using a Mac, Internet Explorer was no longer going to be an option for me. I used Firefox pretty regularly, and also spent a lot of time using Chrome and Safari on the PC. I decided Firefox would become my default browser.
About a year into it everything was going pretty well. There was a few crashes from Firefox and Entourage here and there, but coming from a PC crashes were nothing new. I just considered that they were part of the game. Then slowly they started becoming more frequent. About two weeks ago I was up to a minimum of 1 Entourage crash and 2 Firefox crashes a day. That got real old real quick. So I decided it was time for a change.
I decided that Safari and Apple’s Mail app would be up for the test of possible replacements for my email and browser issues. I have been using them both for almost 2 weeks now and I have been very happy.
The Mail app is awesome. After setting up some rules to get all the mail sent to the correct folders I am not missing a beat. I wish I would have started using the Mail app since day 1. It has only been 2 weeks and I am completely sold. Good bye Entourage.
The browser is a little different story. Overall I am very happy using Safari, just not as happy as I am with my email choice. Safari feels much quicker than Firefox. It looks cleaner, and just feels nicer. One thing I miss is a few of the really neat Add-ons that I was using with Firefox. I have installed Greasekit inSafari, which is basically meant to replicate the functionality of Grease Monkey. So far that has not been working too well, but I’m still tinkering with it.
I am going to give it a few more weeks, and see how it continues to go. I am considering giving Chrome for Mac a try if Safari continues not to super impress me. I can say if anyone out there is still using Entourage get rid of it ASAP and go with the Mail app.