I'm a long term Thunderbird/FireFox user and lately I have been re-evaluating my decision. The quality control and support for these programs have been heading down-hill for a while now.

I occasionally have to hit reload in FF5, and it is definitely a lot slower than it used to be. At first I attributed it to my ISP and/or other software I'm running, but it has become clearer that FF5 itself is to blame. Friends of mine have been touting Chrome as a superior browser, and I have to admit I'm tempted lately.

As for Thunderbird, my latest experience has been the penultimate straw. After installing TB5, it would crash immediately upon running, and I couldn't access my emails for a day. I finally found - thanks to Google and NO thanks to the Thunderbird site - an old version that I could re-install. I was afraid that the install of TB5 may have altered some configuration files that would prevent me from downgrading, but fortunately that wasn't the case.

It has been over a week now since others have reported the same problem as me, and still there is no fix, or even acknowledgement, of the problem from the TB team. And it's not the 1st time a bug has been reported by many users but 'ignored' for weeks on end by the support team.