I use the Google Chrome browser because it’s fast, clean and light.   Unfortunately because it is fast, clean, light and new it still lacks features you might expect in a browser.  Chrome’s bookmark management is especially lacking.

When I read news, I’m a compulsive ctrl-clicker on links that look interesting and that I want to read and write about later.  By the the time I’m finished, I have a very full window of tabs.  In Firefox I would choose to “Bookmark All Tabs”. To save the tabs, my only choice in native Chrome is to bookmark each tab separately.   That still won’t make them available to other browsers or other computers.

Evernote, the very powerful multi-platform free information storage and retrieval app comes to the rescue.  I just open a new note in Evernote and drag the contents of the URL bar from Chrome into the Evernote note.  It becomes a clickable link in Evernote.  When I’m finished, I can reorganize the links and annotate as to why they’re interesting and what I plan to do with them.  When I’m finished I have a  workplan for the day that can be synced via Evernote to other computers or used with any browser.

If would be nice if this also worked for creating links with Firefox, unfortunately when the contents of the URL bar from Firefox is dragged into Evernote, it’s not clickable.

We started writing Enquiring Mimes just over a year ago and one of our first entries was intended to convince you to start using the Firefox browser. Mozilla had, amidst great hoopla,  just released Firefox 3.

We gave you a number of reasons to switch if you were still using MS Internet Explorer — they’re probably still true today, but the landscape changed.  There are now two other competitive web browsers, Google Chrome and Apple Safari, both very fast and by comparison their speed made Firefox 3 seem very slow.

Our story has a happy ending. Firefox 3.5, a major release, has been sent out into the world and once again, Firefox is great.  They replaced the Java engine and it’s now as fast as the other guys and there’s a lot to like.  It’s nice to come home to Firefox without sacrificing speed and there are more great plug-ins than ever.

Here’s the top five best features of Firefox 3.5

• Fast – according to betanews.com, Firefox 3,5 is 251% faster than Firefox 3.
• Location-aware browsing – if you let it, Firefox can figure out where you are and give location information to sites you’ve approved providing you a more local experience.
• Support for new web technology -  This will be a benefit in the future as sites begin to use the new features like downloadable fonts
• Better handling of tabs and windows – easier recovery of mistakenly closed tabs and windows.
• Private browsing – Firefox will keep no records of your browsing if you head for the wrong side of the tubes.

Here was our list from last year for Firefox 3: (all still true, “great performance” has been regained)

• Secure
• Great performance
• Smart URL bar learns how you browse
• Smart bookmarks
• Smarter “Remembered Password” handling
• Good security and malware protection
• Use it on Windows, Mac and Linux

Download Firefox 3.5.

Related articles

• Top 5 Killer Features in Firefox 3.5 (mashable.com)

Aviary, the folks that already have a powerful free suite of online graphic tools, has added very fast screen capture and online image markup tools.

The new tools are Falcon and Talon – Talon is a Firefox browser plugin for capturing images, and Falcon is the image markup tool that lets you add shapes, lines, arrows and crop, resize and flip images.  If you’re not using Firefox, you can open Talon by either using an image from  your computer or take one from the web.  If you want to capture an entire web page just put aviary.com before the web page’s URL and the entire web page is scraped into Falcon.

Aviary’s claim of being fast was well justified in our testing.  After clipping an image with the Talon extension, it immediately opened in Falcon for editing.  You can also store the image directly on your desktop or host it on their servers.

It’s a very slick tool and can be useful if you want to capture images from the web and then either scale the image or markup it up for clarification.  I normally use and like Snagit, a $49.95 screen capture and manipulation tool, but for simple captures in the future, I expect to be using Falcon.  The plugin for capture is  especially useful if Firefox is one of the browsers you use.

The other tools in the Aviary suite include an image editor, a color editor, an effects editor and a vector editor.

Visit aviary.com to try it out.

George Washington's Teeth

Even in our excremental economy, PCs are cheap.  Microsoft wants to run their entire advertising campaign on that basis, but whatever.  I often use a well-loved MacBook, but in the last year have had occasion to buy two PCs.  Bought a Desktop PC for about $400 and a netbook, mini-laptop for about $300.

After the immediate glow of geek happiness wears off (new PCs always seem fast), the question becomes how to become productive fast.  (I actually had to buy the netbook because we went away for the weekend and I forgot my laptop and needed to do some work).

What I do is connect to Internet and download these 11 apps, and I’m ready to go in about 20 minutes in a productive work environment.

Let me explain.

• AVG Antivirus – Sure you need anti-virus, the world is weird, but AVG Free does a great job and it’s, well, free.
• Google Chrome – Sorry, Microsoft Internet Exporer doesn’t work for me.  I can’t be productive with such a slow browser.  I install the new-ish Google Chrome, which isn’t yet full-featured but is extremely fast.
• Firefox – I also install Firefox, the major open source competitor to IE.  Firefox becomes very full-featured by use of plug-in technology.
• FreeCommander – You owe yourself something better than Windows Explorer.  FreeCommander has plenty of features for making your file and PC management easier.   The dual-interface alone is worth the download.
• Evernote – I store all my information in Evernote (and so should you).  Download the PC desktop version to sync to your web based data.
• Picasa - The best way of managing and editing digital images and videos.
• Skype – For free phone calls to other PCs, conference calls and video calls to other team members.  I also use it for video calling my family.
• Foxit Reader – A lightweight PDF reader, to replace the slow and heavy Adobe Reader
• notepad++ – A hardy open source replacement for Notepad.  Use it for any text editing work that you can get by doing without a word processor.
• Videolan – An open source video player that plays just about any videos you’ve got.
• Revo Unistaller – Finally install this utility to uninstall some of the crap that is often pre-installed on new consumer PC’s.  What comes quickly to mind is the trial version of Symantec Internet Security which is probably already installed on your new PC.  If you activate it, you’ll get it free for a couple of months and then will be nagged to death by the program trying to get you to buy the full version — just saying.

The rest of the apps I use:

• Gmail - Web-based email
• Office Suite – Either Google Docs or Zoho Office, both free and web-based.

Okay, you’re ready to work.

I admit it. When I’m reading web pages I’m a compulsive ctrl-clicker. If you don’t have this ADD-like habit, in most browsers if you press the control key and click with your mouse on a link, the link opens in a new tab.

Yikes, after ten minutes or so, I have tabs open from here to the freeway.  These are all pages that I want to take a closer look at but may not want to keep around forever in bookmarks.

Read It Later is a Firefox plugin that let’s me mark web pages for later reading.  It also allows me to sort the pages I’ve collected by date added, alphabetically, sitename or apply a “quality” score to the page, automatically using PostRank, so that when I have time, I can read the most important pages first.

A “Click to Save” mode let’s me collect pages to read just by clicking on the link without having to open the page.  It’s great for a compulsive clicker like me.   Also nice is the ability to synchronize my reading list between computers and an offline mode that let’s me read my pages while not online like on a plane or in my case, at dog agility.

Download Read It Later [via webworkerdaily]

Inquisitor was originally built as a plug-in for the Apple Safari browser.  Now it’s available for the Firefox and IE browsers as well.  Inquisitor adds a drop-down box to the Firefox search box where it does word completion, tracking of your search history as well as easy access to Flickr and Wikipedia searches.  It also shows you how often you’ve been at sites you’ve already searched.

Inquisitor is a must-have plug-in for speeding up and shaping your searches.

The modest downside is that when you install Inquisitor, it changes your search engine to Yahoo, not surprisingly since the software is owned by Yahoo!  Your search engine can easily be changed back to Google in the plug-in’s preferences.

Download Inquisitor [via webworkerdaily]