The Download Blog

Well, it took a few months, but Yahoo on Wednesday caught up to Firefox 3 with a beta plug-in for its Delicious bookmarking service.

The Firefox add-on for Delicious "now has full Firefox 3 support while retaining Firefox 2 compatibility," said Nick Nguyen, senior product manager for Delicious, in a blog posting.

Delicious lets people save their bookmarks online, tag them with descriptive keywords, and share them with other Delicious members.

It's only one plug-in, I know, but since I'd griped about its absence before, it's only fair for me to call out its availability for download … Read more

The drop-down menu in the upper right-hand corner of your browser window is indispensable for information hounds who regularly narrow their searches to specific databases. Some queries will yield more precise results if bounced around Amazon or Wikipedia instead of Yahoo or Google. CNET producer Randall Bennett demonstrates how you can achieve the same in Opera Mini 4 by adding custom search engines.

Taking an old-school tack to an ages-old computer problem, the PortableApps Suite approach to mobile computing feels more Web 0.5 than 2.0. Instead of hosting programs online, PortableApps is a comprehensive application suite that fits onto and runs from almost any thumbdrive with at least 512MB of space, and can be shrunk down even further if need be.

The suite's flexibility is impressive. It manages some of the best freeware applications from a taskbar menu that runs instantly when clicked on. User-favorites Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird are here, as well as the entire OpenOffice.org office suite, … Read more

Flock is the first major browser geared toward social-networking addicts. Built on Firefox code and available for both Windows and Mac users, it will do absolutely nothing for you if you're looking to get away from MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, blogging, and other Web 2.0 mainstays. If, on the other hand, this is one addiction you're looking to feed with a shovel, Flock has everything you need to stay one step ahead of the bleeding edge.

Nine buttons at the top of the collapsible sidebar make accessing any of your social-networking or frequently used Web sites easier … Read more

If you can't remember the URL of a site you've once visited, what do you do? You can either scour your history, willing the evasive address to remain listed, or you can search in Google by the keywords you remember and hope the site you want floats near the top of the results.

The latest version of Opera Software's 9.5 Beta browser, released Thursday for Windows, Mac, and Linux, makes fishing for past Web addresses much easier with a new feature called Quick Find.

Quick Find essentially bundles the keyword search directly into the Opera browser'… Read more

So you've been having fun with Facebook's somewhat half-baked chat service for the last day now, but are you growing tired of having to first log-in, then pop-out the chat window? For those of you who want to chat without this two-step process, there's a nice little tweak discovered by Mozilla Links that lets you set Facebook chat to pop out in Firefox's side bar.

I'm not really a fan of sidebar driven applications (gDocsBar not included), but this implementation works out pretty well. It will load up your buddy list and work just like … Read more

FoxyTunes inserts a music player control panel into the Status Bar of Firefox and Internet Explorer, eliminating the scramble to switch windows so you can skip that Barry Manilow ditty you forgot to delete from your collection. The interface is easy to use and is highly customizable.

When opened, it shows a navigation array with buttons for Play, Pause, Mute, Next Track, Last Track, Volume, and the useful Show Player, which brings your music player to the front. There's also a Hide Player button, as well as a music Search tool, keyboard shortcuts, skins, and a mini player that … Read more

The obvious first question one asks the AT&T execs when beginning a discussion of Pogo, the company's new Web browser, is "What is AT&T doing getting into the browser market?" The answer you get is, at first, amusing. It's a chance to build "another relationship with the customer," they say. They also tell you it could be a great conduit for AT&T messages (e.g., brand or product advertising). Sounds like the makings for a truly awful product, does it not?

Video demo is embedded at the end … Read more

The past 24 hours have seen Mozilla Firefox (download from CNET Download.com for Windows and Mac) getting another security hole plugged, while its social-networking derivative Flock (also at CNET Download.com for Windows and Mac) earns a minor behavioral bug fix.

Firefox's most recent safety snafu is another JavaScript engine security problem that was causing the browser to crash during JavaScript garbage collection. Although there was no indication that this error was exploitable, says Mozilla, other similar errors in the past were. Not to mention the benefit of not having your browser randomly going kablooey.

Flock's fix … Read more