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.