“Free” is a very popular word nowadays, with a lot of developers creating some pretty amazing software that they distribute for free, both on mobile and desktop operating systems. Of course, free in most cases means only “free to use”, because developers still make money by displaying ads or having a pro version that is paid and has a few great features absent from the free version.

Windows is no exception – in fact, it is the OS with the largest software database (which sadly isn’t available in a single location, but Google is your friend) and there are a lot of great applications that are completely free and can easily compete with other, paid products. Here’s just a short list I believe you should check out:

Nowadays, anything that can be downloaded and installed to make the internet more useful, or fun to use, is certainly going to be something worth looking at. This is certainly something that the ScrapBook add-on manages to achieve, which is why its popularity has increased dramatically since its initial launch.

Something that is being talked about more and more online is Firebug. This is a new and unique tool that is essential for web development. The Firebug tool integrates with Firefox in order to allow users to have a huge amount of web development tools at their disposal. This means that users can now do a number of things, including editing and debugging, as well as things such as monitoring CSS, HTML and even Javascript on any live web page. The process for using the tool is quick, simple and therefore; painless!

We’ve reviewed a lot of browsers, and while many are taking the threat of web page scripts seriously, there are few that really specialise in what is a relatively new field in the security world. NoScript addresses that imbalance by offering up additional protection from malicious code that can work with or without additional internet security.

Download accelerators used to be all the rage back in the days of dialup, especially as many of them introduced features that browsers at the time simply couldn’t do, such as split part downloading and pausing of live downloads. Now the browser market has done some catching up and most people have good broadband connections, are download accelerators a thing of the past? Not if FlashGet has anything to say about it.