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If you're out running around in the "real world," you can tell when you're getting into a more dicey neighborhood. Whether it's the look of the people, the appearance of the buildings, or just the incessant wailing of the police sirens, it can become pretty obvious that you may want to take some extra precautions. The saying goes that on the Internet nobody knows you're a dog. By the same token, on the Web you may not know that you just stumbled into an unsavory neighborhood.

Secure Browser is, as its name might suggest, a secure browser. What that means is that with this tool you're really playing in a sandbox: no matter what bad things you might run across online, not to worry, because everything is walled-off from the rest of your system. Nasty scripts and bad downloads aren't going to mess you up. You can explicitly whitelist or blacklist sites to allow or deny access. And even if you do run into a problem, it's easy to back out of it and reset things on your machine to their original state. So now if you decide to live dangerously and click on one of those Google "visiting this site just might seriously mess up your life" links, you may stand a chance of getting out alive (your mileage may vary—please think carefully before you do that).

Built on top of a Windows version of Firefox 3.6, it comes complete with Adobe Reader and Flash plug-ins. That means you should be able to use it on any system that supports that browser.

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Unless you have unlimited time and resources on your hands, you're probably familiar with newsfeeds. There just aren't enough hours in the day to visit all the sites you're interested in, so you've subscribed to a bunch of feeds to bring that information to you. Everybody's got their favorite newsreader, the tool that lets you keep an eye on all those feeds. Here's another one you might want to take a look at.

GreatNews calls itself "the intelligent RSS reader." The intelligence seems to be in the myriad ways it lets arrange and rearrange your feeds and keep an eye on what's happening in the world. You can choose a layout as simple as a list to catch headlines to one as complicated as a newspaper page, displaying whole articles in fullscreen mode. Organize items with labels, or create filters to highlight new items that are particularly of interest to you. It robustly supports import and export of subscriptions, so it won't take you days to configure it to monitor all your current subscriptions.

GreatNews is available with a full-on installer, as well as a ZIP version that gives you only the most important bits, suitable for installation of a USB thumb drive. It's a Windows application and should be right at home on your Win2k (or later) system.

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Seems lately that you can't go through a day without somebody calling your attention to some clip on YouTube or another video sharing site. Watching it once is okay, but if you decide you want to look at it again, you're stuck with having to download (stream) it all over again. It might just be quicker to save it locally and watch that copy instead.

Ask and Record Toolbar can help you with that. Hit the magic button and tell it to save your video, and it will keep a copy on your local drive. Now you can replay it as often as you like, including while you're offline. And while you're in the neighborhood, what about audio? Well, as luck would have it, you can also record streaming audio with this tool. Same drill: just listen and record, then play it back at your leisure. There's also a built-in tool to convert your new video and audio files into different formats. And there's built-in search engine goodies too—the "Ask" in the name is the folks at Ask.com, the other other search engine.

The Ask and Record Toolbar is a Windows application. It runs on systems under Windows 2000 and later. And remember, kids, play nice and don't use this to do bad things with copyrighted content. But you knew that, right?

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We've seen numbers that show that no matter how many web pages there out there, and no matter how much social networking stuff is available, the most-used facility on the Internet is plain old email. Even if you factor out all the spam and junk flying around, that's a lot of email.

Zimbra Desktop is a free email client with a lot of added goodies. It does all the email stuff you'd expect, allowing you read and write messages, and work with both POP and IMAP servers. It's also smart enough to work with web-based mail services like Gmail, Yahoo, and the lot. But along with email, it's also got contact management, calendaring, and more. Think of it as being like Outlook but without Outlook's hefty price tag. And since there are versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux, you're going to have to work pretty hard to find a machine you can't use it on.

You can download Zimbra Desktop for free. In addition, they've got big deal enterprise-size network email solutions (not free), although you don't need them to run the free app.

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If you're serious about web design, then you've got to make sure that your sites and their pages behave as expected under various browsers and situations. One way to deal with this is to make sure you've got several different ones running all at the same time; a more civilized approach might use a tool like Site Inspector.

Site Inspector can let you see what your site would look like under both Microsoft's IE as well as Mozilla's Gecko/Firefox family of browsers. That in itself is probably worth the price of admission. But wait—there's more! You can also list all the images, forms, links, and other goodies on a given page. You can highlight different page elements to better understand why your page is so awesome (or why it is so broken). An onscreen grid can help you fine-tune your page layout.

You can download Site Inspector for free. It's a Windows app, so you'll need to be running at least Windows 98 and have a copy of IE 6 or better. Adding Firefox lets you do the whole two-browser thing as well.

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You run tons of software every day, but how much of it actually lives on your machine? If you use Gmail instead of Eudora or Google Docs instead of Word Perfect, you've heard about "software as service" and "cloud computing". Rather than having a copy of somebody's shrink-wrapped software application running on your desktop machine or even a box back in the server room, you're accessing those types of tools via your web browser or otherwise making things happen across the 'Net.

Firing up a full-blown web browser every time you want to check the mail or edit a document can get to be a bit of a pain. You don't need all of the browser's functionality—or all of its distractions—to get your job done. That's where a tool like Prism comes in.

Running as a standalone desktop app or as a plugin to your web browser, Prism basically creates a single-purpose instance of your web browser. Rather than surfing all around, or getting sucked into Facebook, if you're running Google Docs through Prism, you get Google Docs and nothing else. It's kind of like running Word, inasmuch as you've now got a single-purpose tool that helps you get your work done, and doesn't get in the way in the mean time.

Prism is compatible with systems running Linux, OS X, and Windows as a desktop app, or you can run it as an add-on in Firefox. Either way it's free.

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Some people just love souvenirs. You may recognize them as the ones who can't go to the Grand Canyon without grabbing an official Grand Canyon ashtray or water bottle. On the other hand, it is nice to collect a little something and bring it home with you to help prompt all those happy memories of journeys past. That all works okay if you're traveling around in the real world, but where are the souvenir shops for the trips you take around the web? For those, you're going to need to create your own little bring-along goodies.

Web Page Thumbnails is a tool that can give you a hand. With its easy to use interface, you'll be grabbing web pages and turning them into thumbnail images in no time. It's got a built in web browser, so there's no messy cut-and-paste of URLs between IE or Firefox and this tool. Use your new thumbnails to catalog interesting pages you run across as you wander around the web, or maybe something more useful, like creating a graphical sitemap of your website, complete with pictures. It creates a gallery of images you've already grabbed, so you'll always know where you've been (keeping an eye on where you're going is up to you).

Web Page Thumbnails is a free download. It's a Windows application and will run under WinXP and later.

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Hardly a day goes by—or at least hardly a week does—without a new version of some big deal web browser being published. Sure, they've all got the greatest new features and can run rings around what you're already using, but there's one thing they definitely don't have: your bookmarks.

If you've been online for any time at all, you probably have a list of bookmarks and favorites longer than your arm, and it would be a major-league pain in the neck to have to move all that stuff over manually. Good thing there's a tool out there like Transmute.

This application is designed specifically to import and export bookmarks and favorites between different browsers. It supports Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer, Safari, and more, so your to- and from browsers are probably included. And it's easy to use; just pick your Source and Target browsers from the drop-down lists and let the exporting begin.

Transmute is a free download. It's a Windows application, although they do offer unsupported versions for Mac and Linux as well.

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For much of the modern world, all that stands between you and utter disaster is a password. Lots of online accounts depend on an email address as a user name, so if somebody's after your stuff, they're halfway there just by virtue of knowing that address. That means that choosing a good password is even more important.

The best password is the password that has the least meaning in the real world. Your pet's name, dictionary words, the word "password"? Not such good choices. Passwords that include both upper- and lower-case alphabetic characters, numbers, and even punctuation marks are better. And you get bonus points for making them extra long as well. So how do you know if your password is a good one?

Check out The Password Meter. This free online service takes a look at your password and lets you know how it measures up. Sure, there are no "password police" out there to really say that you've made good choices or bad, but these guys will point out places where you could improve things (no repeated characters) and where you've made good choices (including at least three of the four character types listed above). One drawback to this tool is that it caps you at a max of 16 characters for passwords that it tests. The security of your passwords will increase dramatically as the number of characters increases.

If you're a little squeamish about checking real passwords on a non-secure site like this, you can download the tool and run it on your local system. The heavy lifting and analysis is done by a chunk of JavaScript, so it's not really talking to the server.

The Password Meter is a free service. If you've got a browser and care about security, you should be good to go.

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When you write in Word, OpenOffice Writer, or any other high-powered word processor, you've got built-in spell checking, grammar checking, and more. But any more, lots of your writing doesn't take place in one of these desktop apps. Writing blog posts, creating Tweets in Twitter, and lots of other places have you composing directly in your web browser, where these types of tools aren't necessarily available to you.

You can add the ability to check spelling, grammar, and usage with After The Deadline. This tool is available as an Add-on for Firefox. Click in a text field on your online form, hit the After The Deadline hotkey, and it'll take a look a things and let you know what it thinks might need attention, highlighting spelling errors in red, problems with grammar in green, and even style suggestions in blue.

And if you don't happen to have Firefox, they've made the core functionality of this tool available as a bookmarklet that you can use with Safari and Internet Explorer.

After The Deadline is free for personal use. All you'll need to use it is a recent copy of Firefox and a dedication to making (and fixing) spelling errors.

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