Listed below are some essential pieces of software, with links to their sites. Most of them are freeware. Please read the disclaimer, before downloading anything.
Audio
- AIMP
- AIMP is a full-featured free music player designed with sound quality and wide, customizable functionality in mind. Over twenty audio formats are supported. Audio is processed in 32-bit for crystal-clear sound. The player features a 18-band graphics equalizer with extra built-in sound effects. You can extend the existing functionality adding Input, DSP and Gen plug-ins from Winamp. All local and global hotkeys are customizable. Full Unicode support. You can convert AudioCD to MP3, OGG, WAV or WMA. Similarly, you can grab sound from any audio device on your mPC to MP3, OGG, WAV or WMA formats.
- MediaMonkey
- Free media jukebox & music manager for serious music collectors. It has a CD Ripper supporting Freedb, MP3 player (plays CDs, WMA and OGG files), audio converter (for OGG, WMA, & MP3 conversion), tag editor, music playlist editor, file renamer, etc.
Browsers
- Google Chrome
- Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer and easier.
- The Chome Web Store has thousands of apps, games, extensions and themes for you to add to Chrome. I prefer to keep things to a minimum to stop it becoming bogged down, so restrict use to the following.
- feedly – A fast and stylish way to read and share the content of your favorite sites. Provides seamless integration with Google Reader and Twitter.
- Pendule – Extended web developer tools for Chrome.
- Google Shortcuts – Display all Google services as buttons in a space-saving popup next to your address bar. Reach services like Gmail, Google Reader, Google Maps, Google Calendar, and many more in just two clicks from your browser. The extension includes more than 150 Google services and websites
- Screen Capture – Easy to use this extension to capture visible content of a tab, a region of a web page, or the whole page as a PNG image
- Up – Adds a button which allows you to navigate ‘up’ from the current URL. For example from http://example.com/fred/barney you can go to http://example.com/fred/ and http://example.com/
- Webmail Ad Blocker – Removes the ads and sponsored links and squeezes out the empty space left behind by other ad blockers to give you more room to write your messages.
- Click&Clean – Click&Clean is an innovative and totally free solution for your PC that will help you to: Scan your PC for Malware – Delete your browsing history – Remove download history – Erase temporary files – Clear cookies and Empty cache – Delete client-side Web SQL Databases – Remove Flash Cookies (LSOs) – Protect your privacy by cleaning up all traces of your internet activity – Clean up your hard drives and Free up more disk space, icluding secure file deletion using external applications, like CCleaner or Wise Disk Cleaner. – Watch flash videos offline, without being connected to the Internet!
- Bookmark Sentry – This is a simple scanner for your Google Chrome bookmarks. It checks for bad links and duplicates and displays a report if it finds something. It can be scheduled to run a scan every couple of days or not at all
- Clickable Links – Turns unclickable urls (http://, https://, ftp://) & email addresses into clickable ones.
- Mozilla FireFox
- Mozilla’s stripped down standards compliment browser is fast and very user friendly, with tabbed browsing, pop-up / ad blocker and the large number of extensions which can be installed to add extra usability.
- I’d also suggest the following extensions for FireFox – I don’t use FireFox for general browsing anymore so have dropped the list of everyday extensions I don’t use or know if they work with FF4 and so here’s the Web Dev tools I do use when testing.
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- Web Development :
- Web Developer – Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.
- IE View – Lets you load pages in IE with a single right-click, or mark certain sites to *always* load in IE. Useful for incompatible pages, or cross-browser testing.
- IE Tab – This is a great tool for web developers, since you can easily see how your webpage displayed in IE with just one click and then switch back to Firefox.
- FireBug – Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.
- ScreenGrab – Screengrab saves entire webpages as images
- Internet Explorer
- make sure you have the latest version
- Avant
- A stand alone application designed to expand services provided by Microsoft Internet Explorer. Avant Browser is a fast, stable, user-friendly, versatile multi-window browser. Avant Browser allows user to browse multiple Web sites simultaneously and block all unwanted pop-up pages and flash ads. All opened pages can be easily stopped, refreshed, closed or arranged with one click. The integrated cleaner helps user to clear all traces and keep privacy. Built-in Yahoo/Google search engine enables user to search for web pages, images, groups, directories, lyrics, software and news in Internet. Program is available in 32 different translations. Now with built in RSS/Atom feeds reader.
- feedly – A fast and stylish way to read and share the content of your favorite sites. Provides seamless integration with Google Reader and Twitter.
- Pendule – Extended web developer tools for Chrome.
- Google Shortcuts – Display all Google services as buttons in a space-saving popup next to your address bar. Reach services like Gmail, Google Reader, Google Maps, Google Calendar, and many more in just two clicks from your browser. The extension includes more than 150 Google services and websites
- Screen Capture – Easy to use this extension to capture visible content of a tab, a region of a web page, or the whole page as a PNG image
- Up – Adds a button which allows you to navigate ‘up’ from the current URL. For example from http://example.com/fred/barney you can go to http://example.com/fred/ and http://example.com/
- Webmail Ad Blocker – Removes the ads and sponsored links and squeezes out the empty space left behind by other ad blockers to give you more room to write your messages.
- Click&Clean – Click&Clean is an innovative and totally free solution for your PC that will help you to: Scan your PC for Malware – Delete your browsing history – Remove download history – Erase temporary files – Clear cookies and Empty cache – Delete client-side Web SQL Databases – Remove Flash Cookies (LSOs) – Protect your privacy by cleaning up all traces of your internet activity – Clean up your hard drives and Free up more disk space, icluding secure file deletion using external applications, like CCleaner or Wise Disk Cleaner. – Watch flash videos offline, without being connected to the Internet!
- Bookmark Sentry – This is a simple scanner for your Google Chrome bookmarks. It checks for bad links and duplicates and displays a report if it finds something. It can be scheduled to run a scan every couple of days or not at all
- Clickable Links – Turns unclickable urls (http://, https://, ftp://) & email addresses into clickable ones.
- Web Development :
- Web Developer – Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.
- IE View – Lets you load pages in IE with a single right-click, or mark certain sites to *always* load in IE. Useful for incompatible pages, or cross-browser testing.
- IE Tab – This is a great tool for web developers, since you can easily see how your webpage displayed in IE with just one click and then switch back to Firefox.
- FireBug – Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.
- ScreenGrab – Screengrab saves entire webpages as images