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[ Windows / Mac / Linux / ]
Firefox is my current Web Browser of choice. Customisable in all sorts of ways with downloadable extensions and themes. Full of useful features and has very good compliance to modern web standards. If you're still using Internet Explorer then do yourself a favour and get Firefox. I could talk your ears off about how much better it is. Some good extensions to get include, Adblock Plus, Gmail Notifier, Foxpose, Tab Preview and BugMeNot. If you're into web development try the Live HTTP Headers and Firebug extensions. Also handles RSS feeds.
[ www.mozilla.com/thunderbird ]
[ Windows / Mac / Linux / ]
Mail client from the same people who brought us Firefox. Also customisable using extensions and themes. Also does usenet and Also handles RSS feeds. I stick with Mail.app on the Mac though.
[ www.opera.com ]
[ Windows / Mac / Linux / ]
Had tabbed browsing before Mozilla was around yet alone Firefox. Also includes an email client. Never really taken to it myself, obviously I'd use it over IE though.
[ Windows / Mac / Linux / ]
Best way I can think to describe this is a free alternative to Microsoft Office. It'll even open Word, Excel and Powerpoint files, and save as those formats too. Also allows you to save files as PDF.
[ www.adobe.co.uk/products/acrobat/readstep2.html ]
[ Windows / Mac / Linux / ]
The PDF reader formerly known as Acrobat Reader. Every computer should have this installed. How else will you read the PDFs you created in OpenOffice? (Well OK, so on a Mac you can use Preview and on Linux you can use xpdf or ggv or...) N.B. Windows users watch for the other stuff Adobe will try and bundle with the download and de-select it. On Mac OS X Adobe will give you an annoying downloader application which you have to install and then that downloads the installer which then installs Adobe Reader. (There's some good rants about this various places.) You can get around this stupidity by changing the User Agent string of your browser to pretend it's not running on Mac OS X. Adobe will then give you the proper installer for Adobe Reader straight away. Safari users can change the user Agent String by using the Debug menu (see here). Firefox users can use this add on.
[ www.macromedia.com/go/getflash ]
[ Windows / Mac / Linux / ]
Essential web browser plugin for viewing those web cartoons. Those and sites written by people who think it's a good idea to do everything in Flash.
[ azureus.sourceforge.net/plugin.php ]
[ Windows / Mac / Linux / ]
Bit Torrent client. Needs Java Virtual Machine installed to run. (Look for Java on this page or follow link from Azureus's How To instructions.)
[ java.com/en/ ]
[ Windows / Linux / ]
Java is Sun's platform independent run time environment. Basically you can write something in Java and it can be run on Windows, Linux, Macs, Suns, Mobile Phones, whatever as long as the device has the JRE installed. If you use a Mac you got Java with it. Windows XP doesn't ship with a version of Java, (if you care why Google it), so you need to download this.
[ Linux ]
Very nifty script which automatically install Internet Explorer under WINE. Useful if you're you're using Linux and want to see how badly IE renders your standards compliant web pages which render correctly in every other browser without having to find a Windows machine.
[ Mac / Windows / Linux / ]
Plays all sorts of formats and DVDs. Will ignore the annoyance that is the region encoding on DVDs allowing you to watch DVDs you bought from overseas without having to change the region coding on your computer's DVD drive (which you can only do five times).
[ www.gimp.org ]
[ Mac / Windows / Linux / ]
"GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages."
[ Mac / Windows / Linux / ]
"HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 converter, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows."
modified:9th April 2008