Looks the the more Mozilla may be stabalising a bit Mozilla Swims With 'SeaMonkey' Browser. A few months back I did try moving to using the Thunderbird email client (mainly as an IMAP client) and found it had excellent off-line/on-line facilities (good for use on my laptop where I'm intermittently connected). It was always clear when headers were being downloaded, and it was simple to sync a local folder on the MUA to its server-side MTA equivalent. However, numerous minor glitches, and a general slower performance than Outlook prevented a permanent move. I'm still waiting to do it.
Dan Sugalski posted this article on his weblog Squawks of the Parrot: And today's an even better one expaining how he's actually used Parrot for something useful. I've been tracking the Perl 6 development process for a while now, and it is interesting to see how something which was originally a joke (an April Fool's joke about the merger of Perl and Python into Parrot) has turned into a real interpreter engine for Perl 6.