Desktop: Features

Blogger Ron Barrett has scoured the IT world to bring you this list of affordably priced business productivity tools that run on any desktop (many are even free). Also check out Barrett's full review of each tool in his A Better Windows World blog.

A new generation of mobile Web browsers is finally making the Web a reality on handheld devices.

Compact, powerful, innovative, new browsers give you more choices than ever before.

Web-based office suites are coming into their own at last. For quite a while, Web-based suites -- which offered word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and other tools associated with desktop office suites -- were extolled not because they did these things well, but because they could do them at all. But the three major competitors, Google Docs, ThinkFree, and Zoho, have all made major improvements in recent months. They're becoming both broader, with more applications, and deeper, with more features and functionality in existing apps.

It's not uncommon to use more than one computer during the course of a week: a Mac at work, a PC at home and a laptop on the road. When people search for applications that will work across all platforms, many look for an open-source solution first, only to discover that apps that work on Windows are woefully underdeveloped for the Mac.

A few weeks ago, the OpenSUSE Project announced the release of OpenSUSE 11.0, the "community" edition of SUSE Linux, Novell's commercial Linux distribution. Like most recent distributions, OpenSUSE is made up of the usual suspects, including GNOME and KDE-based desktops, Live CD and full DVD installation options, and an online repository of software that can be installed using a GUI tool.

Firefox 3 has been out for two weeks now, so get with the program: It's time to hack it. The newest version of Mozilla's browser has plenty of new features, including the site identification button, the Bookmarks Library and what has become known as the "Awesome Bar" -- and I'll show you how to hack them all.

When I switched from a Windows PC to a Mac in 2006, I was very disappointed in my choice of Web browsers. As a confirmed Firefox user, I expected Mozilla's Mac browser to be a no-brainer. But after trying Firefox 1.5 and 2.0 for the Mac, I adopted Apple's Safari -- and haven't looked back. Now that Firefox 3.0 is out, though, is it finally the better choice for Mac OS X?

The Mozilla Foundation is celebrating the arrival of Firefox 3 with a worldwide party -- and an attempt to set a new world record for the most downloads ever of a single software program. OK, so that's silly and extremely geekish, but what the heck? Why not kick up a fuss?

Web farms, whether they are powered by open source Apache or Microsoft's IIS, often require serving up Web content so quickly that the CPU/chipset conservation models we tested as part of our "green" operating system assessment would be of no use.

There are certain popular system architectures that transcend the operating system and will turn your efforts to build a green network operating system brown, figuratively speaking.