In 1992 the Internet wasn’t available to the general public. There were no iPods or any other portable digital music players. Cellphones were big, bulky and analog, mainly used in cars in the U.S. The first consumer digital cameras had just arrived: crude models that cost $800, worked only in black and white, and held just 32 images.

Microsoft was offering the clumsy Windows 3.1, which seemed to crash if you sneezed, and many people were still using the geeky and limited DOS operating system on their “IBM-compatible” PCs. Apple’s technology was way ahead of Windows, but the company would soon enter a period of management mediocrity and product paralysis. And there were scores of PC makers in the U.S., most of them now defunct. The hottest one was Compaq, today a mere brand name for Hewlett-Packard. Dell was still an upstart.

Personal computers were typically sold without modems, networking ports or stereo sound. They had awful, limited color video, far short of what a cheap TV could produce. Too often their designers assumed PC buyers were techies or hobbyists, willing and able to perform complicated hardware and software upgrades and tweaks.

Then and now my main criteria for judging digital consumer products have been simplicity, ease of use and reliability — a sort of index for the burden on the user. And in 1992 most products failed miserably on that scale. They required far too much attention, knowledge and effort by users when theoretically they were supposed to do just the opposite — namely, to make their lives easier.

By around 2001, when the current major operating systems, Windows XP and Apple’s Mac OS X, made their debuts, personal technology had vastly improved. Many of the rough edges had been sanded off. The Mac had long been “plug and play,” and Windows was much closer to that goal. Both systems were fairly stable. The iPod arrived that year, and digital cameras and cell phones — by then well established and growing sleeker by the year — began a rapid evolution that added features and cut prices.

And by then the World Wide Web had changed everything. It had vastly enriched the experience of computing, adding information, entertainment, communication and commerce on a grand scale. Sure, too few people in America had real broadband or wireless networking by 2001, but the balance was getting better. The burden of use for personal computers and related gadgets was trending lower.

Enter the security crisis, which all but destroyed that welcome momentum. There had been viruses for many years, of course, including some big attacks in the 1990s. But over the past five years, the security problem has morphed into a major hassle for people who own and use Windows computers. Viruses and other malicious software programs are still with us, but now they’ve been joined by new categories of pernicious technologies, especially spyware, adware, and fake email and Web sites designed to steal your privacy, your money and even your identity. Spam has gone from a nuisance to a plague.

And the Internet, for all its numerous benefits, has become an engine for this digital onslaught. In the physical world, it isn’t hard to stay out of bad neighborhoods and avoid the company of crooks. But in cyberspace, it’s harder to read the signs — digital criminals, who range from vandals to organized thieves, mingle invisibly with the public in a world where everyone is easily connected.

Today, warding off the myriad threats online takes more and more time, money and effort than ever before. You have to run multiple security programs, interpret all their warnings and alerts, tell them what to do when they detect suspicious activity, and consistently update them. It’s a real hassle, one that seriously interferes with the productivity, and the pleasure, computers can and should provide.

In fact, the burden of using a Windows computer is higher now than it was in 2001. By contrast, Apple’s Macintosh is easier to use than ever, partly because it has so far remained free from viruses, spyware and adware — except for a few minor cases. After stagnating in the mid-’90s, Apple’s software and hardware are once again markedly superior to those of Windows PCs.

But even Mac users have to contend with spam and must learn to avoid fake Web sites designed to steal sensitive financial information. And users of both platforms must also contend with a welter of restrictions on the use of digital content such as music and videos.

So where are we heading?

I believe that in the future the Internet will become more like the electrical grid, a behind-the-scenes platform to which all manner of gadgets will be directly connected, each taking some power and intelligence from the network to perform its task. While personal computers won’t go away, they won’t be the main way to get online, or even needed as intermediaries by many devices. Whenever you watch TV or make a phone call, you’ll be on the Internet, though you won’t be browsing the Web in the manner you do on a PC. This will open up all sorts of new features and interactivity.

Even unlikely gadgets will be connected. Your microwave oven, for instance, will use the Internet to quietly download information that will allow it to recognize the bar codes or radio tags on packaged food products and cook them appropriately.

The star of this new world will be the cell phone — or, more accurately, the device formerly known as the cell phone. Already, some high-end phones, like Palm’s Treo, are essentially mini computers, complete with keyboards and expandable memory. They do many of the things for which people formerly required laptops.
These so-called smart phones can surf the Web, and send and receive e-mail and instant messages, at broadband speeds. They can take, display and edit photos and movies; download and play music, videos and TV shows; play ever more sophisticated games; and even view and edit Microsoft Office documents.

I expect these capabilities to be pushed down to phones that cost less. New competitors will enter the business of making phones and the software and services that run on them.

For these smart phones to flourish, however, they will have to get much simpler to use. The burden on the user will have to drop sharply. Complicated user interfaces will have to be replaced with better ones. Reliability must improve. And the stranglehold on innovation now imposed by all-powerful wireless carriers will have to be broken or loosened. Also, the security problems that plague the PC will have to be headed off somehow. Already, the digital criminals are trying to target cell phones.

But I remain optimistic. The digital revolution can’t be stopped, and the next 15 years should see as many exciting developments as the past 15 have.

But what about the other major function of a laptop-viewing and editing Microsoft Office documents? Well, it turns out you can do that, too, on these devices, at least to a point. Currently, you can read Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, as well as Adobe PDF files, on certain handhelds; you can even edit them and synchronize the changes back to a PC.

Here’s a look at how that’s possible, on the three most popular types of smart phones and PDAs in the U.S.: those powered by the Palm operating system, those powered by the Windows Mobile operating system (formerly known as Pocket PC), and the BlackBerry, which uses both hardware and software from RIM.

First, make sure your device has lots of storage capacity, either in internal memory or on a removable memory card, if your device can accept them. (The Treo, the iPAQ and most other devices running Windows Mobile software can; BlackBerry models cannot.) You will need that room to store your Office documents.

Second, I strongly advise those wanting to edit documents to buy a phone or PDA with a full keyboard, rather than one that relies solely on handwriting recognition or a phone keypad. The software for viewing and editing documents does work on devices without a keyboard, but unless you just want to read documents, the process is painful on these models.

You might think that the devices running Windows Mobile software would do the best job of handling Microsoft Office documents because both systems are made by Microsoft. Or you might imagine the BlackBerry was tops at this task because it is bought mostly by corporate computer departments, where Microsoft Office is the application software of choice. But in fact, the best devices for viewing and editing Office documents are those using the Palm operating system, such as the Palm Treo 650. That’s because of a helpful third-party program, Documents to Go, from DataViz, which is packaged with many Palm devices, including the Treo.

Next best are the Microsoft-powered phones and hand-helds, which come with built-in mobile versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Bringing up the rear is the BlackBerry, which can display Word, Excel and PowerPoint files when sent as e-mail attachments, but doesn’t let you edit or synchronize them with a PC.

Palm OS devices. The best smart phone on the market is the Treo 650, produced by Palm and powered by the Palm operating system, which is made by a separate company called PalmSource. While the Palm software lacks the built-in capability to read or edit Office documents, the Treo comes bundled with Documents to Go, which can import and open Microsoft files in their native formats without downsizing them to some special “pocket” version. It also allows you to edit, or even create, these types of documents and synchronize your changes with versions on your PC.

You can get the documents into your Treo or other Palm device either by receiving them as e-mail attachments or via synchronization with your PC. Documents to Go includes a computer program that performs this document synchronization; I use it often on my Treo 650. It displays documents in their actual fonts, including colors and attributes like underlining, bold and italics. Indents and spacing are also preserved. The Treo 650 doesn’t support different font sizes, and it doesn’t include a spell checker. Documents can be opened from, or stored to, either the device’s internal memory or a memory card. You can also zoom the screen to show more or less of the document, especially important with spreadsheets, which often sprawl across the page and can be hard to read when resized to fit entirely on the small screen. PowerPoint files can be edited and synchronized only if you are using a Windows PC, though they can be viewed if you are using a Macintosh.

In my tests over the years, Documents to Go performed flawlessly, better than the built-in mobile Office programs on Windows-powered handhelds. In addition to being bundled with the Treo and some other Palm devices, Documents to Go is available for independent purchase, in several versions, for $30 to $90, depending on features. There are also versions for smart phones that use the Symbian operating system, including models from Nokia and Sony Ericsson. You can find information and purchase Documents to Go at www.dataviz.com [http://www.dataviz.com].

Windows Mobile devices. There are two kinds of devices powered by Microsoft’s Windows Mobile software. Some are confusingly named “smart phones,” though they generally lack keyboards and some key software capabilities, including the ability to edit Office documents. Others are full-featured handhelds, including some with keyboards, such as several of HP’s iPAQ models, the new Samsung i730 phone and the very latest and greatest Windows Mobile device, the Treo 700w.

The new Treo is the first device built by Palm to eschew the Palm operating system for Windows software. While it’s mainly aimed at the corporate market and, in my view, isn’t as good as the Treo 650, the 700w is probably the best Windows Mobile device. On the new Treo and others, you can read, edit and create Word and Excel files, and synchronize them with your PC. You can view PowerPoint files, but not edit or create them.

As with the Treo 650, you can get these documents into your device either by receiving them as email attachments or by copying them from a PC.

While the mobile Office programs on the Windows devices work okay, they aren’t quite as good as Documents to Go, in my experience. For instance, in a recent test I opened a simple Word document on two Treosa 650 running the Palm OS and Documents to Go, and a 700w running Windows Mobile and its built-in Office Mobile programs. Documents to Go opened the program perfectly in its Times New Roman font and sized it so the words were distinct, and the formatting was preserved. The Word Mobile program in Windows Mobile displayed the document in a different font and in a size that screwed up the formatting. And while Documents to Go allows you to create and edit PowerPoint files, Windows Mobile doesn’t.

BlackBerry. The BlackBerry can view Office documents when received as e-mail attachments, but the function is pretty primitive. You can’t directly import documents or synchronize them with a computer. And you can’t create or edit them, even though you have a full keyboard at your disposal.

There is a third-party program for the BlackBerry that claims to allow editing, creating and synchronizing of Word and Excel documents, but not PowerPoint files. It’s called eOffice, made by a company called DynoPlex, and it’s available in versions ranging from $120 to $200 at www.dynoplex.com [http://www.dynoplex.com].

I wouldn’t want to write a long report on a Treo. But in a pinch, I could have written this column on one. And editing a document like this is a breeze. So you really can leave that laptop at home, at least some of the time.

But not anymore. Gradually, and with relatively little fanfare, Verizon Wireless has deployed a nationwide cellular data network in the United States that blows away the fastest widely deployed networks in Europe, the so-called 3G networks that have been rolled out there to huge publicity. And Sprint is starting its own rollout of a similar speedy network based on the same technology Verizon uses.

That technology is called EV-DO, for Evolution-Data Only, or Evolution-Data Optimized. It is the first wireless technology deployed over a wide area that matches the speed of home broadband — at least the slower reaches of that wired service.

Unlike the most common form of wireless broadband, Wi-Fi, the new EV-DO service doesn’t rely on hot spots. It’s available all over a metro area, wherever there is cell phone service — even in a moving car.

Verizon has been rolling out the new service, city by city, over the past year or so, and it is now available in 61 major metropolitan areas and 65 airports across the country, according to the company. Because it’s based on a technology called CDMA, developed by the U.S. company Qualcomm and not widely used in Europe, EV-DO has given the U.S. an edge, even if only for a while.

You can get the service in two ways. First, you can buy a data-enabled smart phone, like the $600 Samsung SCH-i730, which can handle e-mail, instant messaging and Web access over EV-DO. Or you can buy a wireless EV-DO modem card for your laptop, like the $170 Kyocera KPC650, which allows all your Internet-oriented PC software to access the Web via EV-DO.

There are also different rates. Verizon has been charging $80 a month for an unlimited EV-DO data plan. But recently, it cut that price to $50 a month for people who already have a Verizon voice calling plan.

For those with mainstream phones that are mainly designed for voice calling but are EV-DO capable, Verizon offers a $15-a-month plan that mostly covers viewing short video clips on an EV-DO service called V Cast, but also offers unlimited, albeit much clumsier, Internet access.

How fast is EV-DO? Verizon is predicting average speeds of between 400 and 700 kilobits per second. That’s up to 10 times its previous fastest data speed, on an older network called 1X. In my tests, Verizon’s promise proved realistic, and I often topped 700 kbps.

To put those speeds in perspective, many wired DSL plans in American homes operate at speeds of 700 kbps or less, so EV-DO is in the same ballpark.

There are faster wired broadband connections available, from both DSL and cable modem providers. Many homes with cable modems have service that runs at 3 megabits a second, or four times faster than EV-DO. And some Wi-Fi hot spots may operate at faster speeds as well, though that depends a lot on how they are set up. But EV-DO is clearly a broadband service, at least by the American definition of the word “broadband.” (In Asia, they laugh at our definition. They think of broadband as being 20 to 50 megabits per second.)

So how does it compare with similar services in Europe? European cell phone companies offer better phones, better coverage, and better features and options, in general, than do their American counterparts. But strictly measured on data speed in widely employed networks, they’ve lost their edge. Their high-speed wireless 3G technology peaks at 384 kbps, which is less than the minimum speeds Verizon is promising. And such peaks in any system are rare outside the lab. (EV-DO peaks at 2.4 megabits a second.) Actual throughput with European 3G networks averages 250 to 300 kilobits a second.

In my tests of EV-DO with a laptop card, I averaged 585 kbps. And with the Samsung EV-DO phone, I was able to achieve EV-DO speeds of up to 534 kilobits per second.

The U.S. edge won’t last forever. New generations of the technology used in Europe, to be rolled out in the next few years, will top EV-DO. But there are faster successors in the EV-DO line of technology as well, so Verizon (and Sprint, America’s other big CDMA carrier) have their own future weapons. It’s a battle that should continue, as rival technologies steal the lead back and forth in their quest for dominance.

How does EV-DO compare with Wi-Fi? I love Wi-Fi to death and use it in my home and office, at airports and coffee shops. Even if you have an EV-DO modem in your laptop, I recommend having Wi-Fi as well, especially since it can be faster, and it is treated by Windows and the Mac operating system as a network. EV-DO isn’t quite as seamless on laptops: It gets treated like a really fast dial-up modem call, and the required software is a bit clunky.

But Wi-Fi is limited to places with hot spots or transmitters, at least until citywide deployments become a reality. And using it on the road often means exorbitant short-term fees to a variety of network operators, fees that could each top the $50 a month Verizon is charging its voice plan customers for unlimited use of EV-DO.

By contrast, with EV-DO, you pay one fee to one carrier and can use it anywhere in a city. In my tests, I was able to connect in restaurants, parking lots and even moving cars. And unlike Wi-Fi, with EV-DO, if you leave a coverage area, you don’t get cut off. Verizon merely slows down your connection to the pace of the 1X network.

EV-DO may even find a place in the home, replacing a wired DSL line. If all you use are laptops with EV-DO cards and your home is covered by EV-DO service, then you have all you need for broadband at home. And several companies are working on home wireless base stations that would work with an EV-DO laptop card.

The downsides of using EV-DO at home are that it’s much costlier than wired DSL or cable service, which typically runs $15 to $45 a month, and slower than any wired broadband but the slowest DSL plans. In fact, I believe one reason Verizon has priced it relatively high compared with wired broadband is to discourage home use, which might overload its network.

But for frequent travelers who rely heavily on EV-DO on the road, it may make better sense to just use it at home instead of buying wired broadband service as well, unless of course you have family members who do most of their surfing at home.

So, true, unbounded wireless broadband has arrived in the U.S., if you live in the right place and can afford it. Now you don’t have to take guff from Europeans anymore — at least about wireless networks.

a Web site at low cost, some analysts compared the moment to the invention of the printing press. Millions of Web sites were started, but only a small percentage attracted a significant audience. Now a second eruption of Web publishing by amateurs is under way. And this time, more people are reading and even subscribing to sites published by folks who’ve never seen the inside of the New York Times, CBS or any other media firm.

This latest phenomenon is built on a foundation of three new online-publishing mechanisms that didn’t exist the last time around: blogs, podcasts and RSS feeds. Here’s a brief primer that explains them.

Blog. A contraction of the term “Web log,” the word describes a personal Web diary, organized by date, from the latest to the earliest. Bloggers add entries, called “posts,” to their sites frequently. Posts typically consist of text and photos, with occasional links to audio and video clips. Some blogs are made up primarily of links to stories or commentaries around the Web. Others feature the author’s writing, supplemented with links to relevant material elsewhere.

High-profile blogs, like the sarcastic, raunchy political site Wonkette.com, compete directly with the mainstream media, known as the “MSM” in the blogging world (which refers to itself as “the Blogosphere”). But the vast majority of blogs are written for narrower audiences: family, friends, fellow hobbyists, or fellow fans of favorite TV shows, pop stars and sports teams. A key feature of most blogs is the comments readers are encouraged to post, discussing or debating entries.

You can find blogs by checking blog search and listing sites, such as Feedster.com, Bloglines.com and Technorati.com. Anyone can quickly create a blog with little or no technical knowledge by using templates at free blogging services including Blogger.com and MSN Spaces (spaces.msn.com).

RSS. In order to avoid the obscurity into which the first round of amateur Web sites fell, bloggers have invented a way to distribute their latest entries: RSS, or Really Simple Syndication. It’s a technology that allows browsers or other software to display a constantly updated “feed” of headlines and summaries of blog entries. The way it works is too technical to get into here, but basically, special code inserted in a blog’s innards gets queried by an RSS reader program, which pulls headlines and summaries.

With the right software, a user can subscribe to the feed of a blog, or of a mainstream news site, and receive headlines as they appear. Just click on the headline to read the full entry. All the modern Web browsers, including Firefox and Apple’s Safari, can display these feeds. The most common browser, Microsoft’s aging Internet Explorer, cannot, although a new version due soon will be able to do so.

Podcasts. The newest personal publishing technology is the podcast, essentially an audio blog or personal radio show that can be played on a computer or downloaded to a portable device like an iPod (hence the name). Podcasts range from music programs to commentaries on politics, sports, technology, sex.

Podcasts are harder to create than blogs because you have to record them and then find a Web service where they can be published. Finding and subscribing to podcasts is much simpler because Apple has opened its popular iTunes Music store, on both Windows and Mac, to podcasters. They can register podcasts with iTunes, then iTunes users can download them just like songs, but free of charge. Also, iTunes allows users to subscribe to podcasts, so fresh episodes appear in your iTunes cache as they are created.

So get yourself some news-reader software and a copy of iTunes, and start sampling blogs and podcasts. Then do one of your own. Your public awaits.

Its visual display of files stored in a nested hierarchy of folders has worked pretty well — until recently.

In the past few years, computer hard disks have become huge, and average consumers have begun to accumulate thousands and thousands of files each year — far more than in the past. And that is making it much harder to find any particular bit of information buried in the old folder hierarchy.

Every time you plug a digital camera into a PC to transfer images, dozens or even hundreds of files can be added to your PC in one fell swoop. The same thing happens when you rip CDs or go on a photo downloading binge. Email is accumulating in staggering amounts, and just surfing the Web can add hundreds of files — silently cached copies of Web pages and images.

So the familiar file and folder system is buckling. Unless you’re the rare person who is meticulously organized, who creates a perfect system of orderly folders and recognizable file names, locating information on your own computer can be harder than finding it on the Web. There have always been search tools built into the Apple and Microsoft operating systems, but they were terrible — slow and inaccurate, covering only some kinds of data, not all. So you had to rely on separate search systems built into individual programs, such as email software.

But now a wave of new desktop search tools is becoming available, some built right into new operating systems and others available as add-ons. Big names are getting in the game — Apple, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo. I’ve been testing the leading candidates and previewing some future contenders. So here’s a rundown of the latest methods for finding all that lost or hidden information lurking on your hard disk.

Spotlight: This is the new universal, speedy search system built into Apple’s latest operating system for the Macintosh, called Tiger. Because it is an integral part of the operating system, which handles all files, Spotlight knows about all the key kinds of information stored on the computer. It can rapidly find words or phrases deep inside emails, Microsoft Office files, address books and calendars, Adobe PDF files and more. It can even probe the “metadata” — descriptive information — attached to song and picture files.

Spotlight is always available on the Mac, no matter what program you are in. You just click on a blue magnifying-glass icon at the top right corner of the screen, and a search field appears. As you type each letter of your search term, Spotlight begins generating results in a list of files that drops down almost instantly, organized by type of file. If you click on “Show All,” the list expands into a larger window where you can see more results, organized in almost any way you choose — by date, by person mentioned, by name or location on the computer.

On my Mac, I typed “Hawaii” into Spotlight and instantly got hundreds of hits. Every email mentioning the state came up, as did Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, the address entries of contacts who live there, calendar entries for my vacation in Honolulu and pictures of my trip. Spotlight even showed thumbnails of those pictures and, with one click, presented a slide show of the images. It also found the theme song from the old Hawaii Five-O television show in my music collection.

Because Spotlight is part of the operating system, it avoids one of the big flaws of add-on search systems — the need to periodically “index” new files in batches, a process that spins the hard drive continuously, sometimes for hours. Spotlight needs to do this only once, when you first install Tiger.

Longhorn: Microsoft plans to emulate Spotlight in the next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn. But it’s way behind Apple. Longhorn won’t reach consumers until the fall of 2006 at the earliest.

Based on previews of Longhorn I’ve seen, its planned built-in search system will also be fast and universal, and will avoid long indexing sessions. Microsoft also plans to allow more customization of searches, and many more instant previews of files, than Apple now provides. But these apparent advantages may evaporate.

By the time Longhorn arrives, Apple will likely have a second, even better, version of Spotlight.

Google: Until Longhorn arrives, Windows users must rely on add-on search software, and the best known is Google Desktop Search. It does the annoying indexing, but only when your machine is idle. Plus, it’s fast and fairly comprehensive, including even the contents of cached Web sites.

But the familiar Google search results page, which works so well for the Web, is very limiting for a desktop search. And the software offers only a crude way to sort the results and no way to preview content.

Yahoo: The big online service bought a desktop search engine from a company called X1 and re-branded it. This is a robust product, which indexes and searches many kinds of files and previews most of them in a built-in window. You can also take direct action on e-mails that turn up in your search — for instance, you can launch a reply right from within the search results.

The main problem with Yahoo’s offering, in addition to the fact that it isn’t buried deep in the operating system, is that it betrays its techie heritage. X1 was originally built for techies and hard-core search fanatics. Although Yahoo has cleaned it up a bit, the many choices and settings in the user interface may be daunting to mainstream users. Also, it has much more of the feel of a separate, heavy-duty program than the Apple or Google products.

MSN: The desktop search add-on from MSN prefigures what Longhorn will do, and it’s very good. Like Yahoo, it offers previews of most files right in its search results screen. And like Apple’s Spotlight, it is fast and presents a clean, simple interface that begins generating results as you type your search terms.

The main downside to MSN’s search is that in order to get it, you have to download and install a “toolbar suite” that lives in the Internet Explorer Web browser and adds a bunch of functionality that’s unrelated to search, which you might neither want nor need. Also, by default, MSN’s search product searches only your e-mail (which must be run by Microsoft products) and the My Documents folder. You have to tinker with settings to get it to search your whole computer, something all its competitors do by default. The limited search horizon cuts down on MSN’s indexing time and makes it look faster than it really is, but it will likely cause you to get only partial search results.

There are some other good search products out there from smaller companies, notably one called Copernic, by Copernic Technologies, which has a loyal following of users. Whichever you choose, once you trust desktop search, you may never again find yourself creating a subfolder.

The big advantage of Web mail is that any computer, anywhere, with a browser and an Internet connection can access it. The PC you’re using needn’t have an e-mail program like Outlook installed on it, and it doesn’t have to be configured for your e-mail account. The disadvantages: Since the type of e-mail software the Web providers use is essentially just a Web page, their services typically lack the power and speed of installed programs; they also place limits on how much e-mail you can save.

That’s why, for many years, Web-mail services have most often been the preference of light users attracted to the free email they offer. They’ve also been popular with people who use Outlook or another heavy-duty program at work, but who want an account on the side for personal e-mail. Lately, however, the major Web-mail offerings have gotten much better, to the point where they’re plausible candidates even for serious users. Here’s a quick rundown of how they compare. (A note on methodology: Although you can receive Web-based e-mail via a local program like Outlook Express, I tested the services in their most common mode — Web-based e-mail delivered through Web-based programs.)

All three of the major Web-mail providers now offer much more free storage than was common a couple years ago. Gmail leads with more than 2 gigabytes. Yahoo offers 1 gigabyte for free, and Hotmail provides 250 megabytes. All three also now have decent antispam and antivirus features, and they are a bit less susceptible than Outlook to being exploited by e-mail containing harmful computer code, particularly if you access them via a browser other than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. That’s because malicious software writers have targeted Outlook (and IE) for years. But the three still lack some key features. For instance, none offers a full preview of e-mail content, though Gmail does show you a few words of each message. None allows you to set up multiple signatures you can attach to different outgoing messages. And the Web-based e-mail filters these services provide are fairly crude compared with those in local programs.

As for how they rank, Yahoo Mail takes the lead. It’s fast, and its gigabyte of free storage is more than enough to free most users from deleting old mail. I also like Yahoo’s autocompletion of addresses, as well as its folder and filter systems. Plus, its overall user interface is clean and clear.

Google’s Gmail is also pretty good, though its quirky design could put off some users — it’s clearly still a work in progress. Gmail has the most free storage of the Web-based providers, which is a big plus, and searching all that mail is fast and accurate. But a simple operation such as deleting an e-mail takes more steps than in Yahoo. Gmail’s biggest, most beguiling quirk is its insistence on displaying e-mail in “conversations,” groups that include all back-and-forth responses. This view can be useful, and most local e-mail programs offer it as an option. But inexplicably, Gmail refuses to let you view e-mail one message at a time. It also runs ads alongside every e-mail, based on a scan of the message’s contents.

Hotmail comes in last. It offers only a fraction of the free storage of Yahoo and Gmail, which, for my money, flatly disqualifies it as a serious contender.

Whichever program you choose, Web mail has finally arrived as a viable option. Let’s hope a good thing keeps getting better.