I have been using Gmail as my central online communications hub for a long time now. I was using Mail.app to pop my mail from Gmail until about month ago. Now with all the improvements to the Gmail interface I even stopped using my local mail client with great success. All my email accounts get forwarded to my Gmail account with one exception that I kept out of the loop as a backup for when Gmail goes down (yes even the best systems will have downtime). I get far less spam this way since Gmail’s spam filters are better then any others that I have used. My iPhone takes advantage of Gmail’s imap service so that I have access to my mail when I am without a system.
Now with all these new fast browsers running around the net, the question becomes… Which is the best browser for Gmail?
Of course this is subject to how you use Gmail. Mail in my world often becomes a task that needs to be sorted into projects, and prioritized. I am sure that the Google folks will get their task management tool whipped in shape eventually, but right now it stinks. So I use Remember the Milk for my task management. RTM is powerful enough to do a good job working inside the Getting Things Done methodology. The good folks at RTM have created many ways to add tasks, including a firefox plugin for Gmail and a Google labs plugin for Google Calendar and Gmail.
This is where things start getting interesting for me. The RTM Firefox plugin works really well. I can add an email as a task simply by staring an email. or if I wish setting a predefined label to an email will also create a task out of an email. the labs plugin is not so good. far less power in the labs plugin, and no link to the original email, so I have to copy and paste more. This creates a problem using Gmail on Safari for me.
Both browsers are blazingly fast, and I have seen very little problems rendering pages on either browser.
At the end of the day, it is going to come down to browser plugins. At least until Gmail makes its own task manager much better, or its Gadgets interface more powerful for those brave souls willing to develop their own extensions… I am going to have to say that at the end of the day, the browser that supports plugins is the winner in my book. I know that many people complain about Firefox bloat, but it really comes down to how many and what extensions are installed. I personally don’t use many plugins. Only 7 with three disabled that I turn on when developing/debugging.
For now, the latest firefox is the clear winner for use with Gmail.
I’m using Firefox too although Google is now pushing to use their Chrome browser with all their other products. Chrome seems too stripped down and I don’t know about the plugins since I’ve only used it like twice. I’m with you that Firefox seems to be the winner for all my Gmail needs.