I started with LaunchBar and was initially impressed with QuickSilver's glitz. I used it for several months but became jaded at three things: 1) it's sluggish. The idea is QUICK access to your stuff but I got fed up with the delays. (1.25GHz/1GB Powerbook) You have to wait for it to load up the nice graphics before verifying that it's going to open the right thing. And even if you trust that it is going to open the right thing and you go ahead and press return, you still have to wait for it to finish loading the graphics. As you quickly type several letters of the thing you're looking for it's loading images for each subsequent match so this is non-trivial... a real annoyance for a task that you will do thousands of times. 2) its pattern matching smarts just weren't as accurate as LaunchBar's. I found myself fighting its heuristics more, forcing and training it to go to the right thing. 3) above all, incredible bloat. Check out your Activity Monitor and see how many megabytes of real memory are chewed up by this monster. The result of this is it took memory away from other productive things, forcing them into virtual memory and slowing other things down. All this for a launching utility?

After a good 6-8 months of using QuickSilver I reached a breaking point and tried LaunchBar again. It's less pretty, but I was immediately relieved by its responsiveness and minor system load.

I had recommended QuickSilver to a friend and after trying it out for several weeks he also gave up on it.

If the QuickSilver folks would return to the roots and make it memory-efficient and lightning fast, (and more self-explanatory) I'd be happy to try it again. In the mean time I'm happy and productive with LaunchBar.