Beginning Tuesday morning, Parallels Inc.’s site was slammed as perhaps tens of thousands of people tried to download the latest version of Parallels Desktop. It’s amazing how this application has taken the Mac universe by storm. One estimate I heard (but never confirmed) claimed that this program, which lets you run Windows, Linux and lots of other operating systems on your Intel-based Mac as virtual machines, was second only to Microsoft Office for the Mac in sales.

That makes perfect sense to me. You see, being able to run Windows on a Mac with near-native speeds has been the holy grail for years. It gives you the best of both worlds, and you know that Apple’s Boot Camp was really a watershed. Since then, things have moved along at a fever pitch. First, Parallels Desktop joined the fray, then CrossOver Mac, a solution that uses an open source set of APIs to allow you to run some Windows applications without Windows. VMWare, the biggest player in the virtualization industry, has put up a public beta of their pretender to the throne, VM Fusion.

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In recent months, I’ve settled on Firefox as my default browser. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with Safari, but Firefox seems to provide fewer complications in acccssing some sites. It has, however, some issues with printing certain sites, which forces me to revert if there’s no “Print” link to access the specially-formatted variation.

There has, however, been an alternate to Firefox, one that used the same (or at least a similar) Gecko rendering engine. However, it has largely been consigned to second-tier status as far as upgrades are concerned. The browser, Camino, uses Apple’s own Cocoa development environment, and thus has a more “Mac-like” veneer than Firefox, which is designed to look and operate basically the same across platforms.

For this reason, I’ve put Camino on the back-burner, even though it launches faster than Firefox, hoping that the folks at Mozilla would eventually get with the program and give it the major upgrade it deserves.

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Apple’s legal adventures don’t show any sign of lessening. No, I’m not referring to those little lawsuits that you regularly read about in their SEC filings. Instead, I’m talking about the larger issues that Apple faces in the course of normal operations, such as that recent matter with Apple Corps, the company run by the Beatles, their heirs, and “their people.”

That particular skirmish may have a pleasant outcome: The near-future release of music by The Beatles in downloadable form on iTunes and elsewhere.

Then there was the issue of the iPhone, and Apple’s rights to deliver a product using that name. After a few weeks of on-and-off discussions, they made nice with Cisco Systems, with vague promises that they’ll be working together on “inoperability,” whatever that means. Maybe we’ll see better Mac support on Linksys routers (Linksys is owned by Cisco, in case you hadn’t heard)? A good question, and one that won’t be answered anytime soon.

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I can tell you that the number of prospects for running Windows or Windows applications on your Intel-based Mac can make you dizzy. Decisions, decisions! How do you choose the best option for you?

The first consideration, of course, is whether you actually need Windows. Maybe you’ve just switched to the Mac and you feel you need a security blanket, or you’re accustomed to certain software that is not yet available on the Mac, and probably will never be.

Regardless of the reason, the first choice you need to make is how much performance you expect when running Windows. While Parallels Desktop and the beta of VMWare Fusion reportedly run fine — and I have a lot more experience with the former than the latter — they are not recommended for 3D games or sophisticated rendering software. For that, you’d do better with Apple’s Boot Camp, although you have to endure the restart process when switching from one operating system to the other.

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