What I discovered was that it is not always based upon performance but sometimes on familiarity.
You are, probably correct, to a point, but performance, as measured by arcane tests ( arcane to me, at least) is of no interest. Familiarity? May be. But it is, mostly, my decision. My cable connection was set up with Netscape (yes, a very open-minded ISP). So, it is logical that I would transition to Mozilla, Firefox+Thunderbird or Seamonkey.
I opted to Seamonkey, mainly because when I open it, by the time I get to my mail, it is there. Thunderbird will not let me open mail, as long as it is downloading any. Of course, the comparison is not fair, because I look at the browser, first, so Seamonkey has a chance to download all mail. I have, never, bothered to go, directly, to mail, but with seven accounts set up, it is very annoying to have to wait. And, as long as Seamonkey is around, it will my default for mail and browser. It is, simply, practical. Also, it uses a bit over 130MB memory, important with my puny computer. I have tried with other combinations of browser and mail, and may use nearly 200 MB.
Based on these criteria, Seamonkey comes ahead, and it is, precisely, for the reason that it is irrelevant to others, i.e. that it can handle browser+mail better.
Now, you know the entire story. The end.
UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:9.0.1) Gecko/20111221 Firefox/9.0.1 SeaMonkey/2.6.1
