Free Download A Day

While there are many free web browsers available out there, Flock is a browser with a difference.

Built on Mozilla technologies, Flock combines the best of web browsers with a social component. Flock comes with a built-in blog editor, RSS feed reader, and del.icio.us tagger. Run across an interesting web site? Grab images and text and post them to your blog without having to leave the page. Share your photos with built-in support for Flickr and Photobucket.

The search feature allows you to search through your browser history, looking for terms in the pages you’ve visited, not just their titles, as well as your favorites and the Web.

There are some application-specific extensions available, but Flock also appears to support many Firefox extensions, or you can build one of your own with the instructions and API reference available on their website.

Flock is still in “pre-1.0” release, so there may be a few bugs along the way. The good thing, however, is that since it is a project still in active development, you can help to make it even better by reporting back your user experience.

If the social component of the Web is important to you, you may want to give Flock a try.

Download Flock

It's easy to acquire hundreds of website bookmarks over the years, but it's difficult to keep them organized in a useful manner. It's even more problematic to know if the bookmarked sites still exist if they haven't been visited in a while. AM Deadlink is a handy freeware program which detects dead links and duplicate links in browser bookmarks and text files. Once you've verified that a link is indeed no longer useful, you can delete it permanently. It will be easier to find the important bookmarks when the dead ones aren't cluttering things up.

AM Deadlink works with bookmarks/favorites in many of the most popular browsers, including IE, Netscape, Firefox, and Opera. It can also work with urls in tab delimited and comma separated text files. One other nice feature of AM Deadlink is that it can download the favicons for bookmarked sites, and display them in IE, Firefox, and Opera. The software author maintains a support forum on his website.

Download AM Deadlink

Cooliris is a nifty browser plugin which allows you to preview the content of hyperlinks without ever leaving the current webpage. If you're faced with a page full of links, you no longer have to pick and choose which ones to click at random. Cooliris will give you a glimpse of each links' webpage, so you can easily filter out the sites which look junky, and go straight to the sites which are of obvious interest. Cooliris will also show you previews of search results, Del.icio.us bookmarks, Flickr photos, and YouTube videos. It can be a real time saver.

The Cooliris plugin is currently available for many popular browsers, including IE, Safari, Firefox, and Flock, although the IE7 version is still in beta testing. The software's website has excellent documentation and support features if you run into any problems or have questions.

Download Cooliris

The Opera web browser has been released in "new and improved" version 9.1. Once upon a time, users had to pay for the privilege of using Opera, but the browser is now free for users of all major operating systems including Windows, Mac, and Linux. It's loaded with useful features, including tabbed browsing (with thumbnail preview), a popup blocker, a file download manager, a password manager, and a built-in BitTorrent application. The program also features some innovative concepts like "mouse gestures", where you can train your browser to perform specific tasks (like opening a link), when you move your mouse in a defined pattern. Widgets are another popular Opera feature.

Alternative browsers like Opera are often of interest to people with Internet security concerns, and Opera 9.1 is full of features to protect the user. Opera supports 256-bit encryption, and clearly displays the security level of the site being visited in the browser bar. You can clear the history and cache when exiting the browser, to protect your privacy, and there are a variety of ways to accept or deny cookies. The browser also has anti-phishing protection.

The Opera website clearly describes all the browser's features with text and video demos, and there's a large support community if you have questions or need assistance.

Download Opera 9.1.

There are lots of programs out there that enable you to place "snipe" bids on ebay — that's to say, to delay your bid until the last second so as to keep the final price down. For those who like to snipe, BidNobble's for you!

This program is young and still developing, but useful. There are a number of options to customize the way the program acts and appears on the screen. It can access all the various ebay sites; connects by Secure Socket Layer protocol; supports multiple users; synch's with ebay's time; and tracks auctions by their time remaining, informing you of their status as it goes. This is of course in addition to the usual last-zillionth of a second-bid-placement procedure.

The author of the program invites feedback and suggestions as well as bug reports, so here's your chance to have a hand in the development of a popular tool. The program will run on any system that has the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 1.4 or newer (and provides a download if you need it.) The documentation is comprehensive although a little idiosyncratic in parts.

Get BidNobble

One of the fastest-growing properties on the Internet is Wikipedia, a testament to the power of the user-generated (and maintained) web sites. Since the introduction of the original Wiki Wiki Web, a lot of open source Wiki implementations have been developed. One such program — one that's particularly easy to setup and pleasant to use — is Instiki.

Since Instiki is Ruby-based, it runs on all platforms that Ruby does, including Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. It is extremely easy to set up, especially on Mac OS X. Installation involves just two steps (install Ruby, run instiki.rb) by using WEBrick, a web server, and Madeleine, a persistence layer. These apps ship with the standard distribution of the programming language. Aside from its user-friendliness, this powerful Wiki engine loaded with features: pluggable markup syntax, RSS feeds, keyboard shortcuts, and lots more. Simply put, Instiki is a webmaster's delight.

Get Instiki

We’ve said it before and we hope to say it again: it’s a Good Thing with great commercial software morphs into great free software. And the Opera web browser has done just that. We “sung” Opera’s praises once before when it was free for a day – now the lovely, feature-filled ad-free version is free for good. Used to be $39.

Opera's features include a pop-up blocker, RSS newsreader, e-mail client with spam filter, a notes feature, and much more. And it’s available for just about any operating system you would want to use.

Download Opera

Azureus is a Java BitTorrent client that works well for both newbies and advanced users. You may find it superior to other BitTorrent clients because of its powerful enhancements and features, including multiple torrent downloads; customizable interface; advanced seeding rules; adjustable disk cache; distributed hash table for decentralized torrent; all-in-one port connectivity; automated scanning, sharing and downloading; priority settings for saving and XML support. Lastly, a wizard lets you install a variety of useful plug-ins, including upload and download scheduling and speed adjustment, automatic downloading with RSS Feed Scanner, status mailer for completed downloads, optional torrent information and remote control.

Get Azureus

It takes a chunk of your time every day to search for your legitimate email amidst all the junk mail. Spammers seem to get smarter by the day, finding innovative ways to reach your inbox and grab your attention. Thunderbird is an e-mail client that filters spam, prevents viruses and simply lets you enjoy e-mail again. This open-source program has numerous unique features and a highly customizable interface that makes emailing a more secure and faster process. The program also includes an RSS reader for keeping up-to-date on your favorite blogs. But wait, there's more: you can extend its functionality further with your choice of extensions.

Get Thunderbird