I never saw the need for firefox from the beginning. Mozilla web browser did it all.

It did. And that was exactly why firefox was needed. For your average user, the mozilla interface looked complicated and daunting, with advanced features cluttering it up when in truth, most people couldn't care less about even half of them.

In short, Mozilla Suite is an "everything in the box" package. Firefox is a web browser. The proof of this particular pudding is in the popularity of firefox. To the average person, mozilla suite is incredibly bloated, and very messy.

Big news, I didn't know this one.

So there's going to be a Mozilla Suite 1.8?

Hmm... I never found it so.... sure there were a few features that most people never used, but I could hardly say the interface was confusing.

I am using Thunderbird now and it seems pretty nice, I use it as my spaminator client. I get a LOT of messages there, well, for me it's a lot, maybe 30 a day. The only thing I notice is when I try to grab a lot of messages, maybe a hundred or so, and try to delete, it lags a bit.
I also use a client called Foxmail, pretty nice.

Reason I say is, since I already use Thunderbird, maybe I should try Mozilla again and the browser?
Although I'm happy with my Firefox, I've got my web dev tool plugins and so on. So not sure I need Mozilla, I tried it a while back on a system I built to sell but didn't spend a lot of time with it. I'm happy with Avant, I live in Avant. I can't say I "want" any more features, and I can't say there are any I could do without. It suits me right down.

Ok, well this was a worthless post, guess I'm bored...

you have the option of not installing the email client with mozilla suite and just installing the browser. I use thunderbird along with the mozilla browser only.