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I'm a big fan of Growl, an OS X add-on that creates a universal messaging system on the Desktop. Various plug-ins for Growl allow other applications to send messages. One is GrowlMail, a plug-in for Mail.app, that sends notifications of incoming mail.

Last night I installed Safari 4 Public Beta and then Mail quit working. After a little exploration, I found this notice from Apple that "After installing Safari 4 Public Beta in Mac OS X v10.5.6, Mail may unexpectedly quit when opened if a third-party Mail plugin is installed." It specifically references GrowlMail. I removed it from ~/Library/Mail/Bundles and all is well.

As far as Safari 4 goes, it's pretty cool. Lots of neat features. Some of them have been in Chrome, but of course OS X users don't have access to Chrome. Someone remarked that when Chrome finally comes out for OS X, Safari will have taken all of the wind out of it's sails. Safari 4 is fast, beautiful, and has lots of fun toys. There's only one fatal flaw: it's not reliably or easily extensible the way Firefox is and that's why Firefox will win this battle--at least on my desktop.