I broke down and decided to install Snow Leopard on my Macbook Pro. The main reason was that I found an alternate type of ad blocker which is not related to the SIMBL plug-in.

As it turns out, there is even more functionality than I imagined: you can use an App’s “Get Info” dialog box to set it to open in 32-bit mode and to use Rosetta for backwards-compatibility. This almost fixed PithHelmet, which refused to load because it didn’t recognize Safari 4.0.3; I believe it did allow SIMBL to work. But Rosetta allowed my text-swapping app to work, so no problem there.

In fact, most of the experience in Snow Leopard is pretty much the same as before–it’s just faster, slicker, and has some new functionality. This held true on my MBP, which I did not wipe-and-restore, so good for Snow Leopard.

Alas, the transition is not without a few bugs. The most notable is that the Mail app no longer recognizes as viable my outgoing (SMTP) server, and my ISP is one of those that absolutely insists that you use that SMTP server and nothing else, so for the moment my outgoing POP3 email is not functioning; I’m calling Apple tomorrow to see what they say about it. (Update: I just tried setting my SMTP port to 25, and SMTP now works. Strange, as 25 was one of the ports that it supposedly was using to start with. Anyway, problem solved.)

However, there are a few improvements in Mail, the most notable being that it now checks all of your accounts simultaneously. Previously, it would only check 3 or 4 accounts at one time, waiting for each one to finish before allowing the next account to start its check. Additionally, you can now view messages in threads–though I must admit that I am not 100% sure that that was not available before. Other than that, none of the many obvious lacks in Mail have been addressed.

Safari is noticeably faster, but does have a few things I don’t much like. I don’t care much for the “Top Sites” panel you get with a new tab or window; it never appealed to me, and I don’t see a way to turn it off (I’ll have to check to see if the 3rd-party hacks are still available). Also, I don’t really love the new tab setup with the invisible-until-you-hover-over-it close buttons. And SIMBL not working is more than just about losing ad blocking; I had grown quite used to SafariStand’s feature of allowing keystrokes to move you from tab to tab. I also miss not having the pages from the last session preserved.

I like Exposé’s new setup, including how it now lines up the windows instead of the previous scatter arrangement. It’s also interesting how it now lines up minimized windows as well, in addition to maintaining the largest possible size for smaller windows.

So far, so good; Snow Leopard has mostly delivered nice improvements with relatively few hiccups–not bad for a transitional OS.