What gadgets do you have in your Internet Browser?

I have 3-

Google, Mapquest, and Merriam-Webster (dictionary and thesaurus)

Am I missing any tool's that you'd recommend?

http://www.lavasoftusa.com

and download adaware.com

Also get spybot.com and spywareblaster.com by searching at

http://www.google.com

The most important thing is a firewall at

http://www.zonealarm.com

You will not believe what spyware is on your computer. Really. I was shocked.

Probably should have included those...but technically, they aren't browser add-ins.

Another question for DUer's-

Is there a utility that will preload multiple websites? For instance, I'd like to hit one butoon and load up maybe a dozen webblogs or 6 DU threads....any plug-in utility that does this kind of macro?

you have the option to bookmark a group of tabs (multiple pages open in same browser), and then a click on the bookmark opens all of them.

You can pre-load your Bookmarks (right-click and select make available offline).

Or you could use a full blown-tool like webstripper (adware) or httrack (GPL/free).

as I like to keep as much browser real estate open as possible. I used to have the google toolbar, but quickly realized that it's just as fast to click the google link in my toolbar. I would like to have some sort of dictionary plugin, although google works as a dictionary too.

Does anyone know if there's a spell checker plugin for forum textboxes? I've wanted one of those forever.

Although my spelling has improved dramatically in the past 10 years, I still like to do a quick spell check sometimes. Cutting and pasting to do the check just sucked.

Specifically Mozilla firebird. (www.mozilla.org) and try tabbed browsing. Opera has it too, but it's not free. Tabbed browsing will change the whole way you surf (for the better).

Especially from a developer's standpoint. It's a good thing in theory (open source), but in practice no thanks. In my experience IE is the only browser that always works as expected and I'm a stickler for pixel perfect presentation.

Netscape rushed their branded version out the door loooong before the browser was even close to being usable, let alone being ready for prime time. But nowadays, Mozilla and it's lean cousin Firebird (which I prefer) are truly slick and speedy. Their conformance to CSS and DOM specs have far surpassed IE, and they've even relaxed some of their doctrinaire W3C purity for practicality, inserting ways to emulate IE's quirks. In other words, it's not the hairpulling headache it used to be to code up pages that render identically between Moz and IE.

if you'll accept a small ad in the top right corner.

I'm using a 19" monitor at 1280x1024, so I don't even see the ad, it's so small up there.

The tabs and window management have always been great Opera features going back v3.x when I first started using it. Now, hotlists and toolbars abound, easily turned on and off with keyboard commands, and F11 sends it into full screen mode. Just about anything you can do with the mouse can be done with the keyboard. And it handles popups and hijackers with aplomb. Skinnable and infinitely configurable without add-ons like Avant. And far fewer security holes.

Right click on a highlighted word or phrase and do a search without bothering with the toolbars. Or use the searchbars built into it.

It is somewhat unforgiving of the occasional asshole developer who uses wildly nonstandard java or style sheets. Sometimes, it isn't too happy with the spaghetti code Word and Frontpage come up with, either. Most of those problems have been solved in the latest versions, though.

I'd like to say that websites put up by assholes who use that crappy coding aren't worth looking at anyway, and usually that is the case. Alas, not every single one of them. I have been known to send nasty notes to sites using crappy code for no good reason. Things like saying I'll only buy stuff from sites I can read.

I have to keep an old copy of Netscrap around for my bank, though. They don't recognize Opera yet. A fair number of financial institutions have been slow to do their security checks on any browsers but IE and Netscrap.

And, once I did something that opened every site in my bookmarks. I have no idea what it was, so I'm not sure I'll never do it again. The sight of hundreds of windows opening with blinding speed was amazing, though. Didn't crash, either.

(Wotta trip-- where's that acid thread?)

I don't even use bookmarks. Instead, I've got a suite of pages that I've been editing and dragging around for years with thousands of links, forms, and what-not on them. So I can do those things from my desktop -- Google searches, map searches, dictionary searches, and more -- without the overhead of extra programs. The main page is my homepage, one click gets me access to everything I need.

I'm also using Firebird as my main browser. Straight-ahead no-frills browser, with just a few of the amenities I like built in, such as pop-up blocking. Tons of screen real estate with a narrow uncluttered toolbar at the top. Bliss.

The only "extra" I have installed is a Flash-blocker extension. It's short script written in XUL markup that substitutes a block placemarker for Flash embeds on a page. Which means I don't have to download or endure hyper-bouncy animated ads. A single click on the block will load and play the Flash if I choose to see it.

a MUST!!

www.popupcop.com

500+ kilobytes? No thanks.

When I used IE, I ran KillAD:

http://www.iomagic.org/fsc/killad.htm

It's free, customizable, and the executable is only 30K. It doesn't write to the registry or dump DLLs into the system, so if you don't like it, you just delete it and it's gone.

No comment :)

I still say it's bloated, though.

Then realized it was full of spyware.

I didn't know this until someone on DU mentioned it after I'd already been using the toolbar for a while. Works just as good as any other pop-up stopper, without being as intrusive.

I tried Opera & Mozilla & Firebird and was frustrated by them all. Just goes to show you how much more skillful & efficient good ol' fashioned capitalism can make something great, rather than buying into the "open source" mythos. Programmers would much rather work for a paycheck than sacrifice their spare time.