Free software for daily use
2004-12-22 08:26:52
There's been a lot of excitement lately about the new release of the difinitive version of Mozilla Firefox. No doubt it's a great piece of software and an excellent alternative to Internet Explorer. Besides its security, tabbed navigation and speed, what I really like (more than Opera, the other big alternative) is the huge amount of extensions that not only allow us to configure the look but behaviour. I use the following extensions:
- Tabbrowser Preferences 1.1.1 to enhace tabbed navigation
- Web Developer 0.8 (based in the previous PNH Toolbar, which is much improved here) to anything web related, like disabling styles, outline tables, edit the CSS of a page on the fly, etc.
- greasemonkey allows us to add scripts to pages to modify their behaviour. For instance to make all url linkable, or destroy the famous target _blank
- Adblock blocks unwanted elements (for instance, banners) using regular expressions (to block specific sites, folders, etc.)
- Page Rank Status adds a little icon in your status bar that shows the page rank of that visited site
- ieview opens that page in Internet Explorer through the contextual menu (so we don't even have to copy and paste)
- Gmail Notifier to be aware of our Gmail box
- Bloglines Toolkit to be aware of changes in our list of sindicated news
- ForecastFox shows us the weather outside, and a forecast for next days
Another big news has been the release of the difinitive version of Mozilla Thunderbird, an excellent email manager. It also has several extensions, but in this case I use it as is.
And finally, I'd recommend the use of a good antivirus software like Grisoft AVG, which also happens to be free. In this new version (AVG 7.0 Free) there's a tool to associate the antivirus to your email manager, but htis time it works with Thunderbird too. Perfect.