This list is culled from a straight listing of the most popular posts that offered a Firefox extension for download in 2009. We’re not including posts about configuring Firefox, or even our own hand-rolled Firefox add-on packs—even if they were pretty popular, too. Let’s get to the good stuff.

Firefox 3.7 Theme Makes Your Browser Look Awesome

One of the greatest things about Firefox is that its development happens way out wide in the open. When the design workers start coming up with preliminary sketches of a new release, anyone can peek at them and even compile them into a theme, which does just what the headline suggests.

All-Glass Firefox Enables Slick Transparency Effects

Windows Vista and 7 feature some fairly nice looking transparency effects, but if your primary browser doesn’t use them, it can feel a bit disconnected. All-Glass Firefox v2 tweaks your browser to look just, well, proper in its fancy-pants surroundings.

“Vacuum Places Improved” Speeds Up Firefox with a Click of Your Mouse

You can speed up Firefox by cleaning up its fragmented database, and the Vacuum Places Improved 0.3 extension automates that admittedly pain-in-the-butt process.

Gmail Redesigned 3.0 Focuses on Speed and Message Space

Google Redesigned, a multi-site suite that trades Google’s blue/white/minimal look for a darker, sleeker feel, kept improving its transformative powers this year, adding a host of improvements in its 3.0 release, and later releasing a new version with GReader Redesigned for the RSS hounds.

Dislike 0.2 Adds a Disapproving Dislike Button to Facebook

“I’m having SUCH a bad day—the cleaning lady TOTALLY left her Pine Sol smell all over my bed linens!” That, my friends, is why clever JavaScript tweakers created the Dislike extension.

TinEye Adds Reverse Image Lookup to Firefox

Many of the pictures and illustrations you find across the web aren’t in their original form—and many can be had at better, perhaps more wallpaper-worthy sizes. The TinEye extension makes it a simple right-click maneuver to search out similar copies of any image you come across.

SkipScreen Lets You Pass Go and Collect Your Download

Sometimes, great stuff has to be hosted on public download services, because the file—or the attention it’s getting—is just too much for our meek little personal sites. And the download sites often make it as painful as possible to grab those files. SkipScreen acts as an automated intermediary, jumping through the necessary hoops and entering the key presses required.

FireFound Tracks Your Stolen Computer, Nukes Your Personal Data

This neat little extension, winner of the Extend Firefox 3.5 contest, utilizes lots of Firefox’s built-in features, like geo-location and the extension framework, to offer wary laptop users a way to nuke their personal data, passwords, and history if necessary, track where their machine is logging on after a theft, and cull all kinds of data from the thief. FireFound is, in other words, a smart thing to install if your laptop ever leaves the home.

Gui:config Gives Easy Access to Hidden Firefox Settings

A lot of helpful stuff is tucked away in Firefox’s about:config menus. Gui:config brings them into focus and offers a graphical way to manage them. As the How-To Geek puts it, it’s amazing that this isn’t something being considered for mainstream distribution in the browser.

Memory Fox Manages Firefox’s Memory Use, Aims to Keep It Low

(Windows only): Firefox is decently light with memory on startup, but extensions and plug-ins drag it down as you actually use it. Memory Fox monitors Firefox’s memory use and, once it reaches your pre-set limit, whips it back into shape.

Daum Blue Firefox Theme is Clean, Simple, and Elegant

(Windows only): Well, the headline and picture kind of say it all about Daum Blue, but it’s worth noting that beyond looks, it’s also fairly customizable, and looks even better on Vista and Windows 7 systems.

Decreased Productivity Helps You Browse at Work Without Getting Busted

Sure, kind of anathema for this site’s stated mission, but giving your mind a break at work has real mental benefits, even if your boss doesn’t think so.

UrlbarExt Adds Super Powers to the Awesome Bar

If you’re likely to do more at a web site than just simply bookmark it, UrlbarExt is like a Leatherman for your AwesomeBar. Head to a site’s root, search the site on Google, and do much more from a small array of address bar buttons.

Foxmarks Becomes Xmarks, Adds Search and Suggestion Features

Another headline that pretty much says it all. We weren’t a big fan of Xmarks’ new “discovery” features, but its growing reach into Chrome and other browsers make the former Foxmarks’ expansion a good thing.

Magnetiser Downloads Torrents When No Torrent File Is Available

Given the recent legal crackdown on BitTorrent-centered sites, magnet links (explained here) are increasingly popular. Magnetiser makes it easy to track down a working torrent link to grab the file you’re looking for.

Integrated Gmail Updates with Improved Looks and Handy Features

It must be mentioned that, beyond smooshing together Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Reader into one neatly-arranged Gmail page, Integrated Gmail also customizes every niggling detail of those combined apps, making it worth the try-out, even if you think you like your Google spaces separated into different tabs.

Omnibar Extension Collapses Firefox’s Address and Search Boxes into One

Omnibar is one of the clever ways Firefox can make itself into a Google Chrome clone, and we love that kind of openness ’round here.

Invisible Hand Subtly Shows Best Web Prices

If you’re always looking at online purchases and wondering if you could save more before pulling the trigger, Invisible Hand affirms your hunches for you, dropping down and showing lower prices wherever it can find them.

Ubiquity Sees Major Update, New Look, Better Performance

Mozilla’s future-facing automation and shortcut engine, Ubiquity, continued to get awesome-r in 2009.

App Tabs Creates Permanent, Icon-Only Tabs, Firefox 4.0-Style

We dug the idea of permanent, favicon-only tabs when a helpful reader explained it to us, but the App Tabs extension took a multi-step process and made it far more simple.

This week, Microsoft is donating a new technology to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) that has the potential to make a drastic difference in the fight against the spread of child pornography online.

The technology, called PhotoDNA, was initially created by Microsoft Research. It was further developed by Hany Farid, a leading digital-imaging expert and professor of computer science at Dartmouth College, to help NCMEC in its efforts to find hidden copies of the worst images of child sexual exploitation known today.

Ernie Allen, president and CEO of NCMEC, says child porn is a problem that had all but disappeared in the late 1980s — the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that it was not protected speech, but instead constituted child abuse. Law enforcement had cracked down on its distribution and importation.

Then along came the Internet.

Hany Farid, a leading digital-imaging expert and professor of computer science at Dartmouth College, helped refine PhotoDNA so it could track even altered photos. Click for larger version.

“Twenty years ago we thought this problem was virtually gone,” Allen says. “As wonderful and powerful as the Internet is, it has created an opportunity for people to network with others of like interest, and to access content in the privacy of their own homes that would have formerly put them at risk to acquire.”

Today, says Allen, the problem is exploding. Since 2003, NCMEC has reviewed and analyzed almost 30 million images and videos of child pornography. These photos of sexual abuse are seized from pedophiles who both trade in the illegal images and form communities that reinforce their shared interest in children.

Allen says that the NCMEC cyber-tip line has handled 750,000 reports of child sexual exploitation and child pornography from the public and Internet service providers. “We’re currently reviewing 250,000 images every week,” Allen says. “So this is a massive problem.”

Tracking the Traffic With PhotoDNA

NCMEC has worked with law enforcement to identify many of the worst images of child sexual abuse and exploitation. As they are passed from pedophile to pedophile, many of these images surface repeatedly during child pornography investigations. “Our goal is to stop that victimization,” Allen says. “Using PhotoDNA, we will be able to match those images, working with online service providers around the country, so we can stop the redistribution of the photos.”

The basis for PhotoDNA is a technology called “robust hashing,” which calculates the particular characteristics of a given digital image — its digital fingerprint or “hash value” — to match it to other copies of that same image. “Like human beings, every photo is a little different,” Allen says.

Ernie Allen, president and CEO of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, says child porn is a problem that had all but disappeared until the Internet made its distribution much easier. Click for larger image.

The weakness in most common forms of hashing technology is that once a digital image has been altered in any way — whether by resizing, resaving in a different format or through digital editing — its original hash value is replaced by a new hash. The image may look exactly the same to a viewer, but there is no way to match one photo to another through their hashes.

During the course of working with NCMEC, Microsoft researchers became aware of that weakness in the hash value detection and resolved to overcome the obstacle in tracking down images of abuse. That’s when the company enlisted the help of Dartmouth’s Hany Farid, a noted expert in digital forensics technology.

For the past 10 years, Farid’s Dartmouth lab has been developing mathematical and computational tools to determine whether digital media is authentic. The expertise he’s developed has applications for the media, national security, law enforcement and consumers themselves.

“Everybody’s aware that you can manipulate digital images, sounds and video. What we’ve been trying to do is bring some trust back to that underlying media. That’s been the thrust of my lab here at Dartmouth,” Farid says.

Microsoft Research created the underlying technology for PhotoDNA. It then collaborated with Farid to further develop the technology for use by NCMEC and online service providers.

“The problem was that that the signature was extremely fragile — the tiniest change to the image and the signature would be completely different,” Farid says. “The PhotoDNA technology extends the signature to make it robust and reliable, so that even if you change the image a little bit, we can still find it.”

Farid says another challenge to the task faced by NCMEC is simply finding the images among the billions of pictures floating around the Internet. But he says PhotoDNA’s ability to automate the search will help NCMEC and online service providers get over that hurdle as well. Because the amount of data in the PhotoDNA is small, it allows large data sets to be searched for matches very quickly.

“If I laid down in front of you a couple of billion images and ask you to hand me the ones that are inappropriate, you can imagine the scope of that problem,” Farid says. “And so we have been developing technology that can pluck out those inappropriate images from a sea of billions in a very fast, very reliable way.”

Giving Law Enforcement New Leads

Once NCMEC assigns PhotoDNA signatures to known images of abuse, those signatures can be shared with online service providers, who can match them against the hashes of photos on their own services, find copies of the same photos and remove them. Also, by identifying previously “invisible” copies of identified photos, law enforcement may get new leads to help track down the perpetrators.

“NCMEC is equipped to make the PhotoDNA tool available to law enforcement agencies, online service providers and others working with NCMEC to disrupt the ability of predators to use the Internet to exploit children or traffic in child pornography,” Allen says.

Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, says the company will be working to implement PhotoDNA in the coming months on online services such as Bing and Windows Live, along with other online service providers looking to help disrupt the spread of these photos online.

“We believe the ability to move faster and be more efficient can make a real difference in addressing the problem,” Smith says. “This is an opportunity for us across the technology community to partner closely with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children to use this technology. By combining our efforts, we can have a much bigger impact.”

For some time now, users of the latest versions of Google Chrome would have been noticing the message:

Or the subtle hint:

A small linked image which appears in the bottom-right of a new tab window

On their new tab pages which unfortunately till now have led nowhere, non-existent pages or “coming soon..” messages. Finally we are seeing  some progress towards the development of a “gallery” of chrome extensions as is available for Firefox.
No, the gallery isn’t available yet, however Google is now accepting submissions of extensions created by developers for inclusion in its gallery which is soon to come. The review process for extensions will be fully automated except in cases where the extension has security concerns, such as utilizing an NPAPI (Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface, i.e. a plugin such as Flash or Acrobat Reader) component or a plugin which affects “file://” URLs which could essentially give the plugin control over the file-system.
Addons have been touted as some of the strongest points of Firefox, and while many people have be attracted by the performance and simplicity of Chrome, often the unavailability of addons has been a deciding factor.
Now with the release of the Chrome OS source, Google’s legendary OS has taken a plunge into reality, and extensions are sure to become even more important. With an operating system which is essentially just a browser, it becomes important that at least that be extensible!
With the availability of extensions in Chrome, it will now fight with Firefox on equal ground, and we might soon see a wide variety of Firefox plugins ported to Chrome, since both essentially use JavaScript for creating extensions.
Unfortunately the support for extensions in Chrome is not that… extensive. Popular plugins such as DownThemAll! and FlashGot cannot currently be ported to Chrome due to the lack of a download API, and while Chrome extensions does make Chrome much more extensible, it is still lagging far behind the functionality provided by Firefox. On a very very positive note though, Chrome extensions don’t need you to restart the browser.

In the recently released details about Internet Explorer 9 — which were rather disappointing — among one of the few improvements was support for rendering content using Direct2D , a new API introduced by Microsoft in Windows 7, which provides hardware accelerated rendering of vector content.

It would seem that the same thought had been brewing in the mind of Mozilla developers, and a few days back, they revealed information about their own implementation of Direct 2D in Firefox, and showcased the performance improvements:

Impressive! And get this, you can download a build of Firefox 3.7 with Direct2D rendering right now!

At this rate it would seem Mozilla will have Direct2D implemented in Firefox — if not in Firefox 3.7 coming mid-2010, then in Firefox 4 coming later the same year — quite possibly, much before Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 9, which has no concrete release date yet.

This is NOT a phone. Seriously! It’s more like a micro-handheld computer fitted with security features that will put the CIA to shame and also put an end to TVs, laptops and what not! This small device has so much in it that I’m still striving to figure out what all gizmos it will soon replace! Its navigation system is as accurate as they come. It’s connected to satellites, which will in a year or so, let you click photos of places in NEW YORK even as you sit at the nukkad sipping chal! You can already watch all national TV channels on it; All this with a pretty decent battery backup of 1.5 days. And did I mention the amazing 5 meg camera, which shoots DVD quality videos? Phew!

SPEC CHECK

• 16 GB inbuilt memory, expandable to 24 GB
• Weight: 125 g
• 2.8 display
• 5 MP camera, Carl Zeiss lens, twin flash graphics card

For more details, Visit www.nseries.com

Source – Technology Uptill Date

Media playback, office tools, virus scanning and more: Turn your USB flash drive into a portable powerhouse with these 50 free applications.

If you jump from computer to computer on a regular basis, you’ll often come across the frustrations of having a system without the software you need. Well with the convenience of a USB flash drive, there’s no reason why you can’t take all of your favourite apps with you on the road.
Whether you want to burn CDs, create a web page, edit audio tracks or use your favourite browser, these tools require no installation and will launch directly from your USB stick. And not only are they portable, but they’re all really useful apps! So dive in and fill your boots (well… USB stick) with these great tools.

Gallery: Top 50 Portable Tools

संजय बिश्वकर्मा बुटवल १४ कात्तिक

विद्यार्थीहरूमा रहेको अन्र्तनिहित प्रतिभा प्रस्फुटित गर्ने उद्देश्यले शुक्रबादेखि बुटवलमा विज्ञान प्रदर्शनीको सुरु भएको छ । शुक्रबार एक कार्यक्रमकाबिच जिल्ला शिक्षा कार्यालय रुपन्देहीका शाखा अधिकृत मोतिराज पौडेलले उक्त प्रदर्शनीको उद्घघाटन गरेका हुन् ।

रुपन्देही स्टुडेण्ट काउन्सीलद्वारा आयोजित उक्त प्रदर्शनी एभरेष्ट बोर्डिङ स्कुल सुख्खानगरमा सञ्चालन भएको छ । तीन दिनसम्म चल्ने उक्त प्रदर्शनीमा रुपन्देही जिल्लाका मात्रै २५ भन्दा बढी विद्यालयका विद्यार्थीहरु सहभागी भएको काउन्सिलका भूपू अध्यक्ष प्रमेश पाण्डेले जानकारी दिए । सन् २००६ डिसेम्बर ९ मा स्थापना भएको उक्त संस्थाले विगत दुईर् वर्षदेखि रुपन्देहीमा विज्ञान प्रदर्शनी गर्दै आइरहेको छ । प्रदर्शनीमा ७५ वटा स्टलहरू राखिएका छन् ।

उक्त स्टलह्रूमा सबै विज्ञानसंग सम्बन्धित सामग्रीहरु राखिएको छ । ती सामग्रीहरु सबै दश कक्षाभन्दा तलका विद्यार्थीहरु आफैले निर्माण गरेका हुन् । प्रदर्शनीमा विद्यार्थीहरुले पानी तताउने सोलार हिटर,गोबर ग्यास,हाईड्रोपावर प्रोजेक्ट,धान तथा गहँु काट्ने मेसिन,विद्युत्बाट चल्ने मान्छे रोर्बट, एक सय मिटर टाढासम्म सुनिने एफ एम स्टेशन, भूकम्प नाप्ने यन्त्र सिस्मोग्राफ,र रिमोटबाट चल्ने क्रेनलगायतका सामग्रीहरु बनाई आफ्नो प्रतिभा प्रदर्शन गरेका छन् । उक्त प्रदर्शनीमा रुपन्देही जिल्लाभरिका २५ भन्दा बढी विद्यालयहरु सहभागी भएको भए पनि सरकारी स्कूलबाट भने एउटा विद्यालयको मात्र सहभागि रहेको छ ।

सरकारी स्कुलकोतर्फबाट देवदह माबि देवदह ८ का कक्षा १० मा अध्यनरत धनपति पाण्डेले मात्रै सहभागिता जनाएका छन् । अन्य स्कुलहरुबाट सामुहिक रुपमा थुप्रै विद्यार्थीहरु सहभागी भई प्रतिभा प्रदर्शन गरिरहँदा सरकारी स्कुलबाट एक्लै सहभागिता जनाएका उनले भने आफूलाई एक्लो महसुस गरेकोजस्तो देखिन्थे । सरकारी स्कुलमा अध्यन्रत भएपनि उनको प्रतिभा बोर्डिङ स्कुलका विद्यार्थीहरुको भन्दा कम थिएन ।अन्य बोर्डिङ स्कुलका विद्यार्थीहरु दर्शकहरुलाई आफ्नो प्रतिभातर्फ आकषिर्त गर्न व्यस्त थिए तर उनी भने आफ्नै सुरमा थिए । उनले रिमोटबाट चल्ने सानो रुपको रोर्बट क्रेन बनाई प्रदर्शनीमा राखेका छन् । यसो हेर्दा सामान्य किसिमको जस्तो देखिने उनको त्यो क्रेनलाई रिमोर्टको माध्यमबाट वास्तविक क्रेनकोजस्तै गरी चलाउन सकिन्छ । उनले उक्त क्रेन तीन महिना लामो समय खर्च गरेको निमार्ण गरेको बताए । सामान्य काठको टुक्रा, विद्युतीय मोटर र अन्य सामग्रीहरु जोडेर बनाइएको उक्त क्रेन बनाउनको लागि एक हजार पांच सयभन्दा बढी रकम खर्च गर्नुपरेको उनले बताए ।

प्रयाप्त सामग्रीहरु उपलब्ध भएमा उक्त त्रेनलाई ठूलो रुपमा परिणत गरेर ठूलाठूला सामानहरु पनि उठाउन मिल्ने क्रेन बनाउने खुवी आफूमा रहेको उनको दावी छ । क्रेनजस्ता अरु थुपै्र विज्ञानका सामग्रीहरु बनाउने सिप आफूमा रहेको उनले बताए । तर आर्थिक अभावका कारण आफ्नो प्रतिभा अझ राम्रो तरिकाले प्रस्तुत् गर्न नपाएको गुनासो उनले गरे । त्यस्तै सिद्धार्थ ईंलिस बोर्डिङ स्कुलका विद्यार्थी प्रदीप श्रेष्ठ र भरत गलामीले भने भूकम्प नाप्ने यन्त्र बनाई प्रदर्शनीमा राखेका छन् । आफूहरुले उक्त यन्त्रले भूकम्प गएको समयमा कति रेक्टरको भूकम्प गयो भन्ने सजिलै नाप्न सकिने उनीहरुले दावी गरे ।

प्रदीप र भरतजस्तै अक्सफोर्ड बोर्डिङ स्कूलका विद्यार्थी कृष्ण भण्डारीले एक सय मिटर टाढासम्म सुन्न सकिने एफ एम स्टेशन निमार्ण गरी प्रर्दशनीमा राखेका छन् । डन चिल्ड्रेन एकेडेमीका विद्यार्थी सागर भण्डारी र आशिष पाठकले नयाँ प्रविधिको धान तथा गहुँ काट्ने मेसिन बनाएर प्रदर्शन गरेका छन् । प्रदर्शनीमा एभरेष्ट बोर्डिङ स्कुल, दीप बोर्डिङ स्कुल लगायतका विद्यालयहरुका विद्यार्थीहरुको प्रतिभा देख्न पाइन्छ ।

Dainikee.com