1: Hyperwords - All in the Right Click!

Well, my two week descent into unusability and lack of functionality that is Safari, is finally over.

About two weeks ago I undertook to stick to Safari all the time, 24 hours a day/7 days a week, while at home. Thank goodness I had an oasis of sanity every weekday when I went in to work. As slow as my office computer is (P4 with 384M of ram) it was a relief to be able to drag my mouse backwards to return to the previous page.

Think you are safe on the internet because you use Firefox? Think again. With the market share of Firefox increasing daily - more malware and virus authors (and websites) are exploiting this browser to spread their wares.

Fortunately, the open nature of Firefox typically makes fixes come shortly after a vulnerability is discovered, and also allows for addons which can further increase your security online.

Here is a short list of top scripts to help you keep safe while browsing the web. Some of these may exchange usability for security, so see what works for you and go with it!

I’ve been a Firefox user for a few years now, since it came out really, and I love it. It’s a great browser and the extensions can turn it into anything you want it to be, from an FTP client to a multiplayer pong game.

I’ve been using a Mac for a little over a year now and while I’ve opened Safari a few times for fun, I’ve never used Apple’s built-in browser for any real length of time. I decided a few days ago to see — just for the heck of it — whether I could use Safari exclusively at home for two weeks. While I certainly do miss Firefox and all it’s great, useful extensions, the challenge is made a little easier because of Safari’s speed. I haven’t done any scientific experimentation, but it is my impression that Safari is faster than Firefox.

At first, Flock appealed to me in a purely superficial way. As you may have noticed, I’m a sucker for style, good design and pretty textures, and Flock certainly unites all of these features.

Fortunately, that’s not all there is to tell. Flock is based on Mozilla Firefox and was first released in 2005. Back then it may have been a little bit ahead of its time since social web was only in its beginnings. Recently however, Flock has enjoyed very positive media coverage and its popularity virtually exploded in the beginning of this year, reaching close to three million downloads and increasing the number of active users by 135% [Source via Wikipedia].

Opera is a very overlooked web browser in my opinion. It has some nice features and it’ s really fast at browsing the web too. OK, the widgets don’t integrate into Opera as well as add-ons for Firefox but they’re still pretty damn cool and Opera doesn’t need to be restarted when they’re installed unlike Firefox.

In this post I will discuss a few cool widgets that I have stumbled upon while browsing the Opera Widgets archive.

(1) PageRank Widget

Page Rank is a cool little widget that you can download within Opera that lets you calculate the Page Rank of any website within seconds.