Because two or three things suck - at different levels - doesn't mean they all don't suck. It just means they differ in degrees of suckiness.

Firefox is headed for a dirt-nap. It's getting worse, not better. 1.5 wasn't a beta release. If they want the air (or rather respect) of legitimacy then they'd better buck up.

I don't use Gimp. I bought Photoshop. Though I hear Gimp is pretty good. I don't use Thunderbird (I can't stand it), I use Apple Mail which I bought (with the OS). I'm willing to pay $1000 for a copy of "TextPad" on Mac OS X. I use Tri-Backup instead of free backup solutions, a commercial password manager, etc.. The list goes on for a long time.

Free can be both a fantastic "deal" as well as very high quality. I didn't mean to imply that commercial = better quality than free (look at Symmantec, it's all commercial and it's all VB garbage). Not all projects are created equal nor are they managed equally. I don't like the way Firefox has been going and Adium has also not been stellar. Fire is also free but has its own problems. There just isn't choice in the IM landscape. Not much incentive for someone to make a commercial IM client for the Mac with iChat and Adium commanding such an install base. Sometimes there just aren't commercial alternatives better or worse.

On the browser front, the selection for Mac OS X is more than enough. But truly, I don't have the time (right now) to spend configuring and changing all the options plus searching for patches to solve all the little nit picks. This is something I've done with Firefox over the course of a year - it was not in its current installed state right out of the box. I blew 2 or 3 days in 2004 researching mail programs and at least half that time was spent in total frustration with Thunderbird. So much frustration that I decided to use Microsoft Remote Client to access my PC for mail. Until Tiger came out and Apple Mail was finally worth a damn.

By the way, where does the opinion, that because something is free it can't/shouldn't be criticized, come from? If you put something out there and make fanfare, you take a risk, regardless of price. Just like I took a risk posting the original message. It was free, so if you didn't agree, you could have moved on to the next thread.