When you open it, it opens to a randomly-selected page, and you can browse from there. WikiTaxi does leave Wikipedia’s images behind to keep the file size down, so if you need graphics this might not be for you. Also, given the nature of WikiTaxi, don’t forget that external links are not supported for obvious reasons. Internal links should still work, though.

For the very large Wikipedias, more memory can help the importer to run faster. Move the “RAM for database” slider to the right before you start the import. Be moderate, however, or you risk your system running out of memory. The default setting usually works fine. When the import is finished, you can use the database right away. The XML dump file, on the other hand, is no longer needed. You can delete it to free up some disk space, but test the database file first in case something went wrong and you must import again.

WikiTaxi compresses all of Wikipedia into a database that’s searchable, fully usable, and small enough to fit on an 8GB USB drive. Wikitaxi requires no installation. Just extract the WikiTaxi archive to any folder, and it’s ready to go. The folder can be on a fixed hard drive, or a portable device like memory stick or flash card. WikiTaxi does also modify a small options *.ini file which it places right next to its own executable so it does modify your PC a little. There’s also an option in the program to update it yourself, if you happen to find yourself near an Internet connection.

As a growing number of people try to take advantage of the Internet’s resources without getting all the online distractions, WikiTaxi is a smart way to bus around one of the best tools on the Web.

By default, Firefox 4 shows the address bar, a search field, the typical back/forward/reload/home buttons, the tab bar, and an orange “Firefox” button in the upper-left corner. There is no menu bar by default: Clicking the orange Firefox button brings up a single, well laid-out menu that contains most if not all of the menu items you’re accustomed to using in older Firefox versions. I was a little thrown off by this button, though; most new browsers have their tools menus on the far-right edge of the toolbar, whereas the Firefox button is on the upper-left, but I was able to adjust fairly quickly.

Firefox 4 does not include automatic updating the way that Opera and Chrome do, although checking out the About option under Help in the menu will automatically start updates downloading, and then ask you to apply them. Firefox 4 has gotten significantly faster at restarting, and the process that used to take several minutes this time took less than a minute on our test computers. Note that this is for updates after you’ve already installed Firefox 4. Updating from version 3.6 to version 4 is likely to take several minutes, because of the significant code changes that have been made.

Firefox 4′s performance has been greatly improved by the addition of graphics processing unit (GPU) hardware acceleration. It allows the browser to shove certain rendering tasks onto the computer’s graphics card, freeing up CPU resources while making page rendering and animations load faster. These tasks include composition support, rendering support, and desktop compositing.

JavaScript plays a major role in the Web, and Firefox 4′s new JaegerMonkey engine combined with the GPU acceleration gives the browser some serious juice. We’ll update this section with CNET’s performance benchmarks as they become available, although initial results show Firefox 4 testing competitively against other browsers. Mozilla’s own JavaScript benchmarks show the browser running 3.5 times faster than Firefox 3.6.12 on the Mozilla Kraken benchmark, three times faster than Firefox 3.6.12 on the WebKit SunSpider benchmark, and six times faster than Firefox 3.6.12 on Google’s V8 benchmark.

Mozilla Firefox 4 is a must have upgrade if you’re running Mozilla Firefox 3.x. If you’ve switched from Firefox to Chrome, however, Firefox 4 may not offer quite enough to lure you back, as many of the new features at least on the user interface end are clearly influenced by Chrome. But no matter what, it may be worth downloading and taking for a spin.

ieSpell features :

• Does not require MS Office or any other third party components, the program is a standalone spell checker for you browser
• Works very well with Internet Explorer and other IE based web browsers
• Start it in three ways: via the right click context menu, the menu bar or the toolbar
• Has support for many web applications such as simple text forms, rich text editors, forums, blogs, webmail, etc
• Has 3 variants of spell checking of the English language: UK, US and Canadian
• Suggestions are sorted by the degree of closeness with the misspelled word
• Intelligent suggesting for misspelled words using typographic “looks like” matching
• Allows you to add or remove your personal words
• Has an intuitive user interface
• Organize your personal words in individual custom dictionaries
• Integrates with MS Office proofing tools
• Comes with an online dictionary
• Powerful API for web application designers.

If your Web application already includes spell-checking functionality, this utility is faster than a server-side solution. Plus, you get to store and use your personal word list across all your applications instead of having to maintain separate ones on each application.

Want to create and label bookmarks that you can access from any computer? Simply click the Toolbar’s star icon, or right-click the star to add and label a bookmark. You’ll be able to access your Bookmarks menu on any computer with the new Google Toolbar installed.

The Google Toolbar for Firefox is easy to install, and most users will simply need to download and run the program and restart Firefox, though some may need to enable it in the browser’s add-on manager. We restarted Firefox and clicked Tools/Add-Ons to open the Add-On manager. We clicked Options on Google Toolbar’s entry, which opened a tabbed settings dialog accessing Search options; Tools, such as spell check, bookmarks, translation, and a new feature, Sidewiki; Sharing, which enables easy sharing of Web pages with friends via a wide range of e-mail and social media resources; Buttons, which selects Google features to appear on the toolbar; Layouts, for changing the look; and an AutoFill feature for Web forms.

After making a few changes, we closed the dialog, restarted Firefox, and clicked Sidewiki, since it was the most intriguing new feature. This is an expandable sidebar that lets Web surfers attach “wikis” comments, notes, and even videos to Web sites. Readers can vote to rank the value of comments, report abuse, and share entries; it’s probably moderated to discourage trolls, too. You access it via an entry on the toolbar or by clicking a small blue tab. We also love the Search for News Articles feature, the Search Highlighting tool, the customizable Autofill feature, and quick access to Google Earth.

Features of Google Toolbar :

• Popup Blocker: Make surfing the web easier by stopping annoying popups.
• AutoFill: Automatically fill in a form with the click of a button.
• BlogThis: Create a weblog post pointing to the page you are visiting.
• Country Search: Restrict your search to pages located in a specific country.
• Google Search: Access Google’s search technology from any web page.
• Search Site: Search only the pages of the site you’re visiting.
• PageRank: See Google’s ranking of the current page.
• Page Info: Access more information about a page including similar pages, pages that link back to that page, as well as a cached snapshot.
• Highlight: Highlight your search terms as they appear on the page; each word in its own color.

The toolbar lets you search Google directly from your browser, and also checks your spelling whenever you type in Web forms, and automatically fills out forms for faster online shopping.

The most noticeable difference from Chrome was the presence of all the links from our Firefox Bookmarks Toolbar in the ChromePlus Bookmarks Bar, a welcome sight since Chrome didn’t install them automatically, though it did import them to the Other Bookmarks folder. An integrated search bar was the only other visible difference, but when we clicked on the tool icon to access the program’s options, we saw what made ChromePlus different.

Starting with the New IE tab, which opens a new browser tab in IE for pages optimized for Internet Explorer, ChromePlus adds an enhanced bookmarks section; a control to clear your browsing history; the ChromePlus Download Manager; and Enhanced Options, which let us configure settings for tabs, bookmarks, privacy data, and how the browser functions as well as access the settings for Mouse Gestures, IE Tabs, Adblocking, Accelerators (keystroke shortcuts), and start-up options. The tabbed Chrome Options dialog is there, too, and there’s links to the ChromePlus Web site and forum as well.

Major Features:

• Double click tab to close page.
• Mouse Gestures.
• Super drag.
• IE tab.
• Download tools supported in context menu.

Enhancements:

• New feature: Supported Microsoft *.mht web pages.
• New feature: New shopping extension on side bar.
• New feature: Sites navigation page for Korean.
• Bug fix: Close some of pages opened in ie mode may lead to crash.
• Bug fix: Wrong up-grade prompt due to up-grade mechanism involved in the base version.
• Bug fix: Sometimes extensions on side bar can not be opened correctly.
• Bug fix: Crash when “Never show side-bar” be clicked twice.

For instance, the Super Drag feature let us grab and drag a link into a new tab automatically, which may be the quickest method yet. Mouse Gestures are useful but require some practice. The IE Tab functioned perfectly, and switching modes was easy. Of course, it supports Chrome’s incognito mode, too.

SlimBrowser’s default user interface is quite busy, but thankfully, you can rearrange toolbars and add or remove buttons to get it looking exactly the way you want. Though it comes with only one skin, others can be added easily. The command buttons are colorful without looking too cartoonish. Each URL that you type introduces a new tab, but the tabs don’t clutter your window. Scroll buttons allow you to move back and forth between them quickly and easily. We were able to create and manage site groups for even more control over browsing. The URL filter worked exceptionally well to block ads while we browsed the Web, and the browser’s Privacy feature allowed us to quickly clean any browsing traces left behind.

Features :

• Multiple site browser based on tab-page interface
• Seamless integration with AI RoboForm FormFiller/Password Manager
• Built-in Popup Killer based on intelligent identification and pre-defined filtering
• Site windows killed by mistake are FULLY RECOVERABLE
• Ability to turn on/off Flash Animation
• Built-in web form spell checker.
• Universal URL Filter: Block ad banners, flash animations, iframes or any components within any web pages by URL patterns.
• Built-in RSS News Rendering Engine. Now you can read RSS news directly inside SlimBrowser without additional RSS Reader software.
• Convenient access to major search engines by Quick-Search Bar
• Seamless integration of most Internet Explorer toolbars
• ScriptPad: Built-in VBScript/Jscript/HTML/Text editor. View screenshot.
• Hidden Sites : hide and show a site at users’ request
• Skinned window frame.
• Free-zooming of any web page.
• AutoLogin: automatically Connect and log into specified website with just one click.
• Seamless integration with online translation engine and dictionaries
• Ability to suppress script error message dialog
• Site Group: Open and save a collection of sites as a group
• Flexible control of startup actions
• URL Alias: Type short alias instead long URL.

SlimBrowser’s default user interface is quite busy, but thankfully, you can rearrange toolbars and add or remove buttons to get it looking exactly the way you want. Though it comes with only one skin, others can be added easily. The command buttons are colorful without looking too cartoonish. Each URL that you type introduces a new tab, but the tabs don’t clutter your window. Scroll buttons allow you to move back and forth between them quickly and easily. We were able to create and manage site groups for even more control over browsing. The URL filter worked exceptionally well to block ads while we browsed the Web, and the browser’s Privacy feature allowed us to quickly clean any browsing traces left behind.

Several notable improvements in the latest revamp keep Firefox abreast of current browsing tech. Along with Mozilla’s new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine that renders Web applications faster on Firefox than ever before, there have also been improvements to the layout engine Gecko for faster page rendering. The new Private Browsing brings a feature to Firefox that competitors have had for a while: the capability to turn off cookie and history logs. Users also have more granular control over cookies, history, and bookmarks in version 3.5 via the redone Clear Recent History option under Tools. Geolocation courtesy of Google has been activated by default in Firefox, so that generic searches such as “city hall” will come closer to pegging the government offices nearest you.

Portable Firefox has some specially-selected optimizations to make it perform faster and extend the life of your USB key as well as a specialized launcher that will allow most of your favorite extensions to work as you switch computers. Portable Firefox will also work from a CDRW drive (in packet mode), ZIP drives, external hard drives, some MP3 players, flash RAM cards and more.

Web developers should be excited about expanded support for HTML5 local storage, downloadable fonts, and native support for OGG-formatted embedded video. ICC profiles, SVG transforms, CSS media queries, native JSON support, and Web worker threads also get lots of love from v3.5. There’s no doubt that Firefox 3.5 is a must-have, but it’s an update that’s more about keeping the browser current rather that blazing new trails.

Share with your favorite services:

1. Twitter, With one click F1 automatically shortens URLs using bit.ly so that you don’t have to. F1 then inserts the shortened URL into your tweet, making the whole process seamless.

2. Facebook, F1 posts the URL, complete with screenshot and description right to your Facebook wall, instantly sharing the link with all your friends on Facebook.

3. Gmail, F1 automatically inserts the URL into the body of your email – simply type in your recipient’s e-mail addresses and hit share.

Once installed, F1 will create a button on the right side of the search box that looks like a comic book word balloon. Click it and the F1 interface appears to add accounts from Twitter, Facebook, and Gmail. Type in a message to accompany the link you’re sharing and then hit Share on the right. The Gmail option will also provide To and Subject fields. Right now, F1 doesn’t do much else. What it does do, though, it does well, so if you want to bring a little bit of social networking to your existing Firefox setup, this is a good add-on to use.

There’s the dedicated Google search window, the effective pop-up blocker, the form autofiller, the translation utility, the spell checker, and the map tool that automatically links addresses in Web pages to maps. Then there’s the full integration with the Google suite: Google Earth, Google News, Froogle, Google Maps, Blogger, and others. Every single one of the integrated tools, including the toolbar itself, is fully customizable. New in version 6 is a slick redo of the translation tool, allowing for one-click translations of single words or entire Web pages.

Note that using advanced features such as PageRank automatically sends the URL of the site you’re viewing back to Google’s servers. This can be enabled or disabled during installation or at any time by clicking the toolbar’s Options button. Unfortunately, there’s no way to remove the search bar, which wasn’t featured in IE 6 but came standard in IE 7 and duplicates IE’s own search bar. Still, by permanently setting the two search bars to different engines, you can at least avoid a waste of space.

Unlike Roboform which is a utility that runs on your PC, LastPass uses a web service that works in combination with a program that runs on your PC. The webservice means your passwords are accessible from different computers: PCs, Macs or Linux boxes. The stand-alone program that runs on your computer means that you can access and use your passwords even when you are offline. But the thing I like best about LastPass is that, just like Robboform, it automatically fills in login forms as soon as you visit a website. This makes it quite different from other password managers that merely store your login information and require you to copy and paste your credentials. And LastPass stores more than usernames and passwords, it also stores webform infomation, in a similar manner to Roboform’s Passcards. It also securely stores your notes.

RoboForm has more options, but LastPass compensates for this by offering easier to access central control. The standout difference between the two is the installation process. RoboForm installs quickly, and the main setup step is to create a master password and watch the tutorials. LastPass will require that you create a master password as well, which is actually the same password needed for your LastPass account, but there’s much more to do before the service is ready to use.

Plugins are available for both Internet Explorer and Firefox so it will not only work on Windows systems but Mac and Linux systems running Firefox. Some other features:
* Portable version available
* Can import information from most other password managers including RoboForm
* Can import IE and Firefox passwords
* Has a useful “Favorites” list
* Partial iPhone integration
* Support planned for Safari and Chrome (but not Opera)

LastPass had the longest setup process. However, this is forgiven, as once everything was complete, LastPass is ready to go with very little management needed from the end user. You can adjust settings and use other features by accessing the Vault. However, the basic usage controls and the features that the majority of users are expecting will work instantly after the installation is complete.

Another note is that during installation, there was a clear explanation of what information was being asked for, as well as what options are available to the user. You’ll find it difficult to get lost during the installation, as LastPass works hard to make it as painless as possible.