Used to be desktop applications were essential to getting the job done, whatever the job may have been, large or small. Now, with all the nimble web apps to choose from, the idea of firing up a huge application for a small task seems almost, well, unproductive and wasteful.

Yeah, sure, no one is suggesting you do away with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Illustrator, Photoshop, Quickbooks and other heavy hitters. However, there are excellent tools on the web where less, in many ways, is actually more. Here are 10 of my favorites.

1. ScribeFire - essential Firefox add-on for bloggers. Allows you to to easily drag and drop formatted text from the Web into your blog(s), post entries, take notes, and optimize ad inventory, directly through the Firefox browser.

2. Firefox - great web browser whose charm lies in all those irresistible add ons that make the whole interwebs experience that much sweeter. Once you pimp out your Firefox, it seriously is difficult to function on anything else. Yes, there are the crashes and other peccadillos, but they're easy enough to overlook especially if you are truly in love.

3. Skitch - this is the best, quick image editor and photo sharing web app that is dead simple to use. For quick screenshots and sharing photos, you cannot beat it. For Mac only though. Sorry.

4. Gmail - I've done away with Outlook and Mail and rely on Gmail for several reasons: free, 7090 MB capacity, integration with Google calendar, Gtalk, great search functionality, and the portability is sweet.

5. Google Reader - free, powerful feed reader which allows you to share items with your friends and slog through all your news feeds as fast as your bleary eyes will let you. Bonus - I'm playing with Feedly (Firefox extension) which provides a magazine like start page of your feeds with complete Google Reader integration and Twitter and FriendFeed and more. So far I like, but Google Reader is still number one for now.

Okay, okay, the "essential Firefox addons" list has been done to death, but if everyone else can beat a dead horse, why can't I? Having just freshened up my system I had the unique opportunity to take a fresh look at which Firefox addons I have installed and which ones I can't live without. As it turns out, there's quite a lot of them, so without further ado, here's my 15 essential Firefox add-ons:

Adblock Plus: I don't like red-and-green flashing YOU ARE A WINNER!! ads any more than you.

BugMeNot: I don't like giving my e-mail address, much less taking the time to fill out yet another form and click on another e-mail confirmation link, any more than you.

DownThemAll!: DownThemAll! isn't just useful for downloading a ton of files at once (though that's most certainly its best feature)--it also makes a great general-purpose download manager for when Firefox's built-in options aren't enough.

ErrorZilla: Firefox's standard the-site-could-not-be-reached error message is so passé. ErrorZilla augments the lowly "Try Again" button with six more: Google Cache, Coral Cache, Internet Archive Wayback Machine, Ping, Trace Route, and Whois.

Mark Pilgrim, a high-profile blogger and life-long Mac user who recently caused a few ripples by switching to Ubuntu Linux, has written a nice list of essential software for Linux. Since he's coming from the land of iTunes, iPhoto, and Mail.app, the list is skewed toward Linux apps that replace (or at least approximate) their OS X counterparts. Pilgrim's picks include digiKam for photo management, amaroK for music, and KMyMoney ("like Quicken without the monopolistic dickwads"). However, there's a few apps he hasn't found an equivalent for, namely iMovie and Quicksilver ("Damn. I miss Quicksilver."). Head over to Dive Into Mark for the complete list.

In other news another notable Mac user, Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow, is also about to make the Mac-to-Linux switch. I'm with Jason Kottke, who says, "If I were Apple, I'd be worried about this."

Okay, we've seen plenty of lists of apps for every user, or every Windows user, or every Mac user. But what about the sysadmins? This list of 10 tools for every admin is a good start, if very Windows-centric. The list is a bit different than it might have been a few years ago, with now-essential tools like a virtual CD app, VMWare or Virtual PC, a USB key, and even an RSS reader making the cut. Okay, admins, what tools did the author miss that you couldn't live without?

[Via Digg]