Five years ago today, a new web browser arrived on the scene. Yes, it was Firefox 1.0. At the half-decade mark, Firefox has become a force to be reckoned with. Nearly one in four people on the Internet is now using Firefox - and that includes the entire population of Antarctica!

If Firefox users were a country, they'd be the third most populous in the world - behind only China and India - at 330 million people! 2009 has certainly been a big year for the Fox.

Mozilla's add-on site reports 4.3 million registered users using nearly 164 million add-ons. That's a lot of people using a lot of add-ons. If you're a new Firefox user, you might be having trouble deciding which are worth installing.

Since this is Firefox's fifth birthday, here are five add-ons that can make browsing better for just about anyone!

Mozilla Labs has announced a winner of the Jetpack .5 contest. While Jetpack is known primarily as a framework for allowing coders with a web development background to put together add-on type enhancements for Firefox, the winner 's project wasn't your run-of-the-mill sidebar hack.

Alex Miltsev's submission was jetpack-to-CUDA, and it provides Jetpack developers with a simple way to offload intense processing tasks to GPUs. CUDA (demo video above) is NVidia's parallel computing architecture - and with CUDA-capable chips in more than 100 million PCs, Miltsev's handiwork could enable some seriously cool (and powerful) Jetpack add-ons to be developed.

The runners up (not to take anything away from them) were much more standard Jetpack offerings - a Google Translate extension, link shortener and sharer, and Twitter client.

Kudos to Miltssev for his creative entry! Here's hoping we see some truly awesome things in future versions of Firefox and Jetpack as a result.

The number of gadgets for Windows 7, both made by Microsoft and third-party developers, has skyrocketed. Only a few months ago there was little choice and almost nothing worth calling home about -- but today, you're spoilt for choice! What you have here are a bunch of the most useful (or interesting) gadgets usable with your shiny-new OS, Windows 7.

Note: If you're going to be installing third-party gadgets, you'll be faced with a confirmation dialogue before they can install:
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Google Reader is great for keeping up with your favorite news feeds, but when it comes to reading blog comments, it doesn't really deliver. GReactions is a Firefox extension that fills the gap. It collects comments from the blog post itself, FriendFeed, Twitter, Digg, Hacker News, Reddit and more. You can access all of this by clicking a link that GReactions adds to the end of each post in Reader.

Don't confuse GReactions with comments on shared Google Reader items. It doesn't allow you to comment, it just pulls in comments from other sources. I'm not sure how reliable GReactions is, though, because it mostly displayed Twitter mentions for the posts I checked out. It could be that Twitter is just quicker to index than some of the other sources, though, and not every post gets added to Dugg or Reddited. Your mileage may vary with GReactions, but it definitely deals well with high-traffic, comment-heavy blogs.

[via Webware]

When I was looking over my news feeds yesterday morning, I though I had spied some exciting news. A few sites were reporting about a new Delicious extension for Chrome. Some of them trumpeted its arrival as proof that Chrome extensions were real.

I found that statement a little odd, because AdSweep has been around since early April. Didn't that pretty much prove the "reality" of Chrome extensions?

To make things even less exciting, the Delicious extension is about as un-noteworthy as they come. If you've got the 'Bookmark on Delicious' bookmarklet in Chrome already, guess what? The extension does the exact same thing. All it does is create a Delicious icon at the end of your address bar instead of on your bookmark toolbar.

I don't know about you, but that's nothing to get worked up about. Google's three example extensions? Equally yawn-worthy.

Heck, I'm still waiting for integration with Google services. Anyone else wondering where the support for things like Google Bookmarks is? It is their browser, after all.

Don't get me wrong - I love Chrome's speed and minimal UI, but after this long I thought we'd see some much more interesting extensions. If you know one, please share it in the comments. I'd love to see it!

One things I would have liked to include in Pimp Your IE8 was bigger list of webslices, but the collection at the Microsoft addon site isn't all that impressive. The crew at LiveSlices, on the other hand, has put together several that are well worth installing.

Among their listings are slices for CNN headlines, Google News, new Flickr uploads, a slice for viewing Twitter updates, and one for unread GMail messages. The Twitter update slice is perhaps the best executed, though it only updates every 15 minutes - likely not often enough for hardcore users, but you're probably 1) using a Twitter client and 2) not running IE8 as your primary browser anyway. The Flickr slices work nicely as well, and provide instant eye candy right in your bookmarks bar.

Create an account on the site, and your settings can be stored for speedy re-install if you have to reformat your machine or remove and reinstall IE8.

[ via Channel 10 ]

Ok, so Internet Explorer might not be the fastest or most efficient browser around, but there are still massive numbers of people using it - and they want to pimp out their browser, too!

If you're an IE user and have gotten the impression that the only mods you're going to find are horrible smiley toolbars, think again. There are plenty of great extras you can install to personalize your browser - you just have to know where to find them.

Still using IE7? Most of these will work just fine for you, too, with the obvious exceptions of accelerators, slices, and Visual Search.

Plug-Ins and Toolbars

LastPass
Sure, IE can already remember passwords and it's been able to do that for a long time. It's not the most secure setup, however, and if someone gets their hands on your computer all they need is a program like IE PassView from Nirsoft.

LastPass encrypts your password vault and stores it on a remote server. All communications with the server are SSL protected and your data isn't readable by the guys at the other end. Once you've set it up, you only have to remember the password to your LastPass account - the addon automatically handles the rest for you.

On top of that, LastPass can also create strong passwords for you and automatically fill forms. It's a must have.

Firefox is a great browser, even in its unmodified, fresh-from-the-install form. If you're installing it for someone else and are trying to provide the most irritation-free experience you can, you might want to install a few of these addons.

AdBlock Plus - One of the most popular addons, and with good reason. AdBlock Plus is a great way to keep annoying ads out of your browser. Text ads can be a little tricky, so the developer has also created Element Hiding Helper to help you keep them in check.

DownThemAll - Downloading a gigantic file only to have it fail at 75% is a huge pain. Yes, Firefox's built-in downlad manager has the ability to resume transfers, but I've had much better luck with DTA.

Flashblock - Flash is great, but some sites just take it a little too far. I don't always want to hear the fan on my netbook whine when I'm surfing, and Flashblock gives me an easy way to smack down power-hungry Flash content.

Greasemonkey - I didn't bother with Greasemonkey for the longest time, but now it's one of the first addons I install. Userscripts.org has so many scripts that fix bothersome little things on so many websites. You'll likely find enhancements and tweaks for many of your favorite sites there, and you'll need Greasemonkey to run them.

Plenty of software exists to help us sort our files once they've been downloaded, but why not head 'em off at the pass and organize them while they're downloading?

Automatic Save Folder is a Firefox Extension that allows you to create rules for your downloads based on their filename or the host domain. Regular expressions are supported, so you can get as complex as you like with your rules.

I'm fine with using Firefox's built-in download manager, especially now that I've got ASF installed. So far it's doing a great job at helping me keep my downloads neatly organized. Taking a few moments to create rules means not having to use an application like Belvedere or Download Mover, and it's only an 80kb addon.

The developer's home page is in French, so run it through Translate if you're not fluent and want to know more about the addon. It's currently experimental, so you'll need to sign in to install it.

[ via Life Rocks 2.0 ]

By now, many of you are probably using web-based office suites like Zoho, Google Docs, or Thinkfree as your primary office applications. If you do and you're a Firefox user as well, you'll probably love the OpenIT Online addon.

I mentioned it previously in my list of 14 extremely useful addons, but it's been updated quite a bit since then.

When you install the plugin, the configuration wizard will help you create file associations. You're not limited to one suite, either. If you'd rather open spreadsheets with Zoho and documents with Thinkfree, OpenIT can handle that. Zoho viewer is also supported and is a nice, fast way to view files you don't need to edit.

OpenIT adds two context menu entries (which you can see in the screenshot above): one to open a file with your default viewer/editor and a submenu that provides access to all available options.

This is a great extension to add to your portable Firefox install. It's an excellent way to make sure you can open a wide array of documents on any computer.

Good things really do come in small packages, as is the case with the URL Alias Firefox addon.
I originally installed it looking to make the address bar more launcher-like. For example, I wanted http://mail.google.com/mail/#inbox to open when I type mail or http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?Category=SPORTS05 when I enter wings.

I prefer using words or abbreviations I can remember easily instead of hotkey combinations, and this experimental addon is the perfect tool for the job.

Since URL Alias also supports a variable (yep, just one), you can do a whole lot more with your aliases than just save keystrokes.

To manage aliases, type the following in your address bar: chrome://urlalias/content/urlalias.xul [enter]

Suppose you want to set up a Google search alias for results from downloadsquad.com.

dls http://www.google.com/search?q=%s%20site:downloadsquad.com

The %s is replaced by whatever text you enter after the keyword: dls firefox addons will return results for all matching DS posts. Change the alias text and url, and set up as many site-specific searches as you like.

First off, let me clarify: I'm not saying that StumbleUpon isn't a very complex, smartly built addon. It's just that I don't go stumbling off to a (somewhat) randomly selected site all the time. Sometimes I'd like walk a path that has been trodden by others searching for the same things I am.

Fast Forward by BuzzBox is an excellent alternative, suggesting possible destinations based on where other surfers clicked through. The addon installs as both a drop-down menu in the main toolbar and as a simple button in the status bar.

The dropdown presents the top destinations for you to choose from, while the status bar icon zips you off to the most popular one with a single click. Two other nice features of Fast Forward are its small size (the .xpi is only 69kb) and the fact that no registration is required.

There is a privacy policy that you may want to read - this is, after all, a recommendation engine and it needs to gather information about your browsing. According to the policy, "BuzzBox does not attempt to determine the identity of any BuzzBox user by analyzing Web usage paths. "

With only 245 total downloads from Mozilla's site, it's going to take a little while before you start seeing suggestions on every site you visit, but Fast Forward has tons of potential and is well worth a download.

[ via TechCrunch ]