Five years ago today, a new web browser arrived on the scene. Yes, it was Firefox 1.0. At the half-decade mark, Firefox has become a force to be reckoned with. Nearly one in four people on the Internet is now using Firefox - and that includes the entire population of Antarctica!

If Firefox users were a country, they'd be the third most populous in the world - behind only China and India - at 330 million people! 2009 has certainly been a big year for the Fox.

Mozilla's add-on site reports 4.3 million registered users using nearly 164 million add-ons. That's a lot of people using a lot of add-ons. If you're a new Firefox user, you might be having trouble deciding which are worth installing.

Since this is Firefox's fifth birthday, here are five add-ons that can make browsing better for just about anyone!

With Halloween out of the way, it's now officially time to look towards CHRISTMAS!

Stop right there! Let me turn those groans of yours -- those Scroogeish grunts of displeasure -- into smiles and laughter! For this year, how about giving the gift of game with Valve's Steam? OK, so they might not be your smiles nor your laughter, but what feeling of joy is greater than seeing someone's face light up with happiness and the glow of a widescreen TV)?

For $10 to $20 you can give someone a game that will provide hours and hours of pleasure and fun this festive season. Think about how much your son would love you if you gave him an excuse to leave the dinner table early, to play with his new toy? Or if your wife could bus virtual tables, rather than real ones? Perhaps you just want to treat yourself to some brain-scratching, finger-contorting goodness. Any way you want it, the best Christmas presents this year will be video games.

Read on for the five best games currently available on Steam. They're all cheap. They're all fun. They're all a complete steal.

Share

MSN.com, Microsoft's search, news and services portal page, hasn't weathered the years well. Tweaking the same basic design for a decade left it far behind the times in terms of design and usability. With today's clean, whitespace-friendly, reimagining of MSN.com, Microsoft ditches the spectre of MSN search and delivers a site that's a little more worthy of showcasing the company's new search hotness, Bing.

A prettier, less cluttered layout and a prominent Bing search bar aren't the only upgrades to the homepage. In a touch that says Microsoft actually knows what year it is after all, you can add your Facebook newsfeed and your Twitter stream to an area on the right side of the page. The news is still there, but it's more customizable, and the layout presents fewer stories at a time than the cluttered old MSN.com did. There's also a local focus, with local weather and a Bing-powered local news widget at the bottom left.

I have to say that, compared to the MSN of old, this new design looks attractive and functional. Speaking of comparisons, though, have a look at our gallery of MSN.com designs since 2001. Looking at how slowly the site changed over the years only underlines how much it just changed overnight.

As web apps become more powerful, more popular, and more full-featured, they're starting to replace desktop apps for many people. A Mac app called Fluid can pull those web applications onto your desktop and turn them into OS X native site-specific browsers.

Fluid has a lot of advantages compared to running web apps in your browser: you get a Cocoa app with its own Dock icon, automatic unread badges for sites like Gmail and Google Reader, and built-in userscript support. Keeping your web apps in a separate browser also means that they can't be taken down when another site crashes in some other tab. You can even create menubar apps, so your favorite webapp will be close at hand, right at the top of your screen.

To find icons for your Fluid apps, I recommend checking out the Fluid Icons Flickr group. The users there have come up with attractive icons for most of the apps on my list. Chris Ivarson has also designed a handful of great icons for Fluid apps.

Now that you know a little bit about how and why you should use Fluid, give these 10 sites a spin as site-specific browsers!

Google Wave

Google's hot new communication tool is a perfect candidate for a site-specific browser. It's pretty resource-intensive, and it's still in the preview stage, so it's prone to crashes and lag. I haven't found any excellent Wave userscripts yet, and the site's favicon makes a nice enough Fluid icon. If you want an additional icon and a userscript that gives you a badge count for Wave, Devthought has posted them.

Google Reader

A lot of people are already using Google Reader as their main RSS app, so it makes sense to set it up in Fluid. You also get the benefit of an unread count badge on the Dock icon and a bunch of great userscripts. One of my favorites is Helvetireader. Try setting it up with Chris Ivarson's icon.

Share

We've already mentioned other ways to power up Google Chrome. Before extensions arrived on the developer channel, Userscripts and bookmarklets were your only options. Both are still great ways to add some kick-ass functionality to Chrome. If you're running the stable or beta builds, you may want to stick to them for now.

• 10 handy Userscripts for Google Chrome users
• 15+ handy bookmarklets for Google Chrome (and other browsers, too!)

Now, onto the extensions!

If you have a favorite that I left off, feel free to share it in the comments!
Share

Have you ever wanted your own bag of leftover schwag from SXSW Interactive? Or how about a new laptop bag? Would an AOL USB LED flexible light help you in any way? Check out each of the treat bags below, leave a comment on the pages that describe the treat bags to enter, and in a week we'll randomly choose our winners.

Sorry, limited to US and Canda, restrictions apply, read the rules, etc. and so on below. Happy Halloween from your friends at Download Squad! Each winner also gets a t-shirt or two from LogMeIn, since they sent us a giant bag of shirts.

Treat bag One: the musical coder.

Treat bag Two: the collector.

Treat bag three: the mobile warrior.

NOTE: Do not leave comments on this post -- you can't. You must leave a comment on the post describing the treat bag you wish to enter to win.


Share

The number of gadgets for Windows 7, both made by Microsoft and third-party developers, has skyrocketed. Only a few months ago there was little choice and almost nothing worth calling home about -- but today, you're spoilt for choice! What you have here are a bunch of the most useful (or interesting) gadgets usable with your shiny-new OS, Windows 7.

Note: If you're going to be installing third-party gadgets, you'll be faced with a confirmation dialogue before they can install:
Share

Growl provides customizable pop-up alerts for hundreds of Mac apps, making sure you never miss an important chat message or completed download. You can use Growl to set an alert for just about anything, and you can also make Growl notifications look practically any way you want. The built-in themes and the list on the official Growl Styles page don't even begin to cover all the options for gorgeous notifications, from the minimal to the very flashy.

Here are 10 lesser-known Growl styles that look a lot nicer than the defaults:

Let me begin with some common knowledge to put us on some common ground. Vista sucks. By association, DirectX10 sucks. In fact, you might not even know what DirectX is -- and you would be forgiven!

DirectX is the piece of software that sits between your computer, and your video games. If you don't play games, you won't have heard of it. When you play a game on your PC it goes through DirectX. And until now, that's all DirectX did.

It's true: DirectX 10 premiered some nice new technologies. But because they were only available on Vista, which as we all know sucked more than a Hoover with a fresh, high-suction bag, DirectX 11 will be the first time most of us get to experience these new, funky technologies.

So you picked up a new Windows 7 laptop (or desktop) or you're planning on buying one in the very near future?

If you took a look at display models in stores like Best Buy or Frye's, you no doubt noticed that new systems come with a lot of programs pre-installed. Lots of software is a good thing, right? Not always.

Trouble is, what you get is often a) not really useful software or b) a time-limited trial. Office 2007 and the antivirus protection the salesperson told you about? They're 60 day trials. After that, they're going to ask you to pay up...But you don't have to.

No, you can tell those apps to keep their hands off your credit card! With all the great, free software Download Squad has covered over the years, there's really no need to burden your new system with that kind of software timebomb.
With just two simple apps you can quickly strip away all the bloatware (that's what us techy types call the excess crud preinstalled on your new system) and get yourself a nice selection of totally free software that will never expire!

Now that you can go and pick up Windows 7 just about anywhere (I hear there's a free copy of Starter coming with every Happy Meal*), let's take a look back at some of Download Squad's past articles about the new OS.

After all, we've been covering it since it was just a rumor and using Windows 7 hands-on since...Well, frankly since that first leak appeared on torrent trackers. With our retail copies in hand, let's go back in time and take a look at some of the Windows 7 coolness you can read about right here!

Get Windows 7 installed on your netbook without a DVD drive!
A handy little secret about your Windows 7 DVD is that it's easy to dump onto a USB flash drive - which you can plug in to any DVD-less computer system and boot! It's a hassle free way to install on your netbook.

Got a clean Windows 7 install? Get some great, FREE Open Source program and games!
While these downloads aren't Windows 7-specific, this list has a ton of awesome apps and games that are right at home on your new Windows 7 desktop or laptop. Best of all, they're all free!!

Microsoft shows off Windows 7's touch features
A number of PC makers have started rolling out touchscreen (and multi-touch) laptops and desktops, and Windows 7 takes full advantage of those technologies. Take a look at what the new OS has in store for real hands-on interaction.

While most computer techs and savvy users usually advise against performing an upgrade from one Windows version to another (what's called an "in-place upgrade"). There's always the chance that your new OS could inherit some problems from the old, after all, and it could potentially cause issues with your current programs or hardware.

Truth is, some users want to upgrade and Windows 7 handles the process pretty well. While it might not be an ideal situation, there are plenty of people who are going to take a stroll down the upgrade path. A little careful prep work will help make the experience a pain-free one.

The wait for an official CNN app on your iPhone is over, and it looks like it was worth your patience. Available on the iTunes store soon -- Download here -- CNN's new app represents a serious investment in mobile news delivery, a 55 million user market according to Neilsen, and adds a few game changing features which may leave rivals MSNBC and Fox News scrambling to catch up.

I spoke with CNN's Louis Gump, VP, Mobile today by phone. CNN's iPhone app takes advantage of 3.0 SDK features and is an attempt to "reinvent news applications on the iPhone". Integrating a huge library of video clips -- as well a live stream during breaking news -- directly into the app, the focus is obvious, taking CNN's global news brand and putting it just that much closer to your fingertips.

The most compelling feature, from by brieding and screen shots -- I wasn't allowed early access to the app itself -- is what Gump called, "Coverflow for news." A feature which lets users swipe through pictures and bullet points, looking for points of interest in the days popular headlines.

Positioned as a premium app, you'll have to fork over $1.99 for the goods, and tolerate just a wee bit of advertising mixed with your content. From what was relayed to me -- and I pressed -- none of the advertising sounds particularly intrusive, with a total lack of preroll video advertising, and sponsor adds appearing inline with, but visually separated from, the textual content.

Also on tap, breaking news alerts for interests you've defined, the ability to store news for later (airplane mode) and of course, social sharing on Facebook, Twitter and via email. And, when you get sick of reading the news, you can make the news -- via iReport -- with mobile uploads of video and images. "People in the field really do have access to the most compelling content, whether that be photo or video", which will be vetted as the current web version of iReport is, both by user filtering and "a small percentage" by human editors at CNN for airing on the network, or publishing on the main CNN site.

CNN was a bit coy about future plans, but said in uncertain terms, "This is not a hobby for us." Adding, "As happy as we are with this app, and we worked really hard, there is a lot more where this came from."

Asked about a possible Android or Blackberry version, "We will definitely be rolling out premium apps in the future", although Gump declined to talk specifics. "We're experimenting" said Gump, sounding like a proud father, "we're putting a lot more resources into mobile."

Update : I wasn't positive at publish time, but yes -- Push updates! More screenshots coming, now that I have my hands on the app!

Update 2: The gallery above is shots provided by CNN. The gallery below contains our first screenshots of the app in action. Take a look for more detail on how the app works and looks.

While I haven't made the switch to Linux full time, I find myself spending more and more time experimenting of late. In particular, I'm enjoying projects like Moblin and the Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

If you're still using Windows for your primary OS there are tons of ways to get your feet wet like a true penguin without making any serious commitments. Here are ten ways to play with Linux painlessly -- if you have another to share, please post it in the comments!

Virtualization

Moba LiveCD
Moba uses QEMU to boot LiveCD and LiveUSB images right from your Windows desktop. It works as a portable app and also offers context menu integration so you can right-click to launch fresh images.

Portable Ubuntu
Using Colinux, Pulseaudio for Windows, and the Xming X server, this package allows you to boot a fully-working Ubuntu environment inside Windows right from your usb flash drive. The bigger the better, obviously. I'd recommend an 8GB or 16GB if you plan on using it regularly.

Here at Download Squad, we like saving money. We love finding freebies, and we're certainly not ashamed to walk up to the cash register with a fistful of coupons. Since the announcement of the Windows 7 pricing scheme, we've been looking for ways to cut the costs to make the move.

We've compiled a list of seven ways you can get that Windows 7 goodness without shelling out quite as many bucks. Read on for savings!