I’ve been using Google Desktop for a while now, and I do have to say that it is crap.

I am uninstalling it, and here is why:

I do a search with Google Desktop for “912″ on my own computer. 912 is the area code for basically all of Coastal Georgia.

Google Desktop returns one result from “My Chat Logs.”

Now, I navigate to “My Chat Logs” using Explorer, hit “Search,” and put “912″ in the “A word or phrase in the file” form.

Windows Explorer returns 38 files that include 912.

So long Google Desktop. You suck.

Anyone have any recommendations on a good Windows search replacement? Or am I going to have to go back to a dos prompt and a search like “dir *whatever*.txt /s”?

Can anyone out there recommend a new browser that is not Opera, IE, or FireFox based that is customizable and works as it is designed?

FireFox’s built-in updater is garbage. It has never worked for me. Every time FireFox needs an update, I have to completely uninstall it, download all my extensions, reinstall the browser, restore my extensions, and restore my bookmarks. Even then, some of my extensions just don’t work (user agent switcher, view in IE, etc).

FireFox has horrible support for Flash. It took me six or eight attempts at uninstalling and reinstalling Flash last night just to get it to work, and even then, it is very slow.

FireFox is crap, it really is. It is the “Apple” of browsers. Mozilla has all these fan boys convinced that they are the best thing in the world, but when it comes down to it, it is just a nice spec sheet with poor implementation (from a user perspective).

It seems to be a cobbled together browser made by people who are fine allowing their users to get frustrated when built-in features do not work. It doesn’t even come close to having a shot at taking down IE until they make it so that non-geeks can use it without having any problems.

Hey Mozilla Foundation– you suck, and your products suck too. Take a lesson from Skype, and make your product’s slogan “It Just Works.” If it doesn’t “just work,” then I’m not going to use it. I’m sick of spending my days trying to figure out why my browser won’t load a page, or why the upgrade ate my settings, or why my browser is taking up 100MB of RAM. I’m sick of having to CtrlAltDel and kill the FireFox.exe process because it just decided to disappear, bless its heart.

So, any suggestions?

Ok, so I’m looking for a new email client.

I used to use Outlook Express a long time ago, but got sick of it. It had no spam controls, and I don’t really like running a standalone spam blocker that never seems to work anyway.

I’ve been using Thunderbird for quite some time now, and it was satisfactory for a while. Now, though, it just annoys me, and has too many issues for me to keep using it.

For example, the “Get Mail” button has never worked. It works for some people, but not for others. Whatever the problem is, they need to fix it. The “Get Mail” button is kind of part of their core functionality, is it not?

The RSS reader in Thunderbird is a piece of crap. It doesn’t seem to check my feeds at the interval I have specified. And, if it does check them, it is likely to pull entries from MONTHS ago as new, and put them in my inbox. For example, there is a deal site I go to that updates Monday through Friday. Today is Sunday. How the hell does Thunderbird think that they had 60+ new deals when they haven’t updated in two days?

The “new email messages” counter SUCKS. It has never been accurate. I am constantly told that I have an arbitrary number of new email, even though I don’t have any. What is the deal with this? It is not that difficult to write a piece of software that counts the number of messages marked as new, and reports them. This is a MAJOR inconvenience.

The Junk Mail controls are JUNK. Why is it that I cannot specify a particular word that will always trigger as Junk? Why is it that I STILL receive email containing nothing but Russian writing to my inbox? I should be able to block ALL email that contains non-English characters.

So, my question for you: Can anyone recommend an email client with a built-in RSS reader, built-in junk mail controls that include blacklists, whitelists, and character set filtering, and most importantly, accurate new-mail counts?