My PC life has always been tied to the Windows family of software tools, with two key exceptions: my browser and my email client. I use Mozilla's Firefox on both my home and office machines. The almost biblical plague of security problems I was forced to endure with Internet Explorer initially made Firefox my preferred alternative. Across time, however, my loyalty to Firefox grew for more positive reasons: solid performance coupled with a growing and desirable feature set.

As Microsoft has already disavowed IE for the Mac, the decision to stick with Firefox on my new Mac was easy (sure, Mac also has Safari and Camino and Opera and OmniWeb, but I have no desire to relearn yet more software!).

I also use Mozilla's email client Thunderbird at home, at work, and now on my Mac as well. Again, Microsoft fails to provide an acceptable Mac solution (for the record, Microsoft does offer an email client for Mac called Entourage, but I'm not about to cough up US$499 for a copy of Microsoft Office Pro just so I can get an email client). By contrast, I pop online with my shiny new MacBookPro, visit the Mozilla site, then quickly download and install both a browser and email client I'm familiar with. No charge. No pain. No Sword of Damocles security threat.

Here's the fun bit: I carry a portable hard disk drive with a neat little variation on Thunderbird called "Portable Thunderbird" (http://portablethunderbird.mozdev.org/). With this setup, I can hot-plug the drive into any Windows box and access my email program, my address book and all my email files and attachments. I assumed I'd be able to also do this on the Mac but soon discovered that the portable version (which is maintained by an individual developer, not Mozilla) isn't available for Mac OS X.

Not to be daunted-and confident of open source flexibility-I installed Mozilla's Thunderbird on my Mac and, with a minor adjustment, taught it to read the data files from the Portable Thunderbird installation. Net result: I maintain my preferred email setup despite working on a Windows PC at one office and on Mac when on the road.