THE INTERNET HAS become an integral part and simplified our lives in an unimaginably short space of time. With the slew of tools listed below, your ride on the Web will now become smoother.

Browsing and File Transfer:
When it comes to browsing the Net, Fireflx claims the honors and continues to remain unmatched in its appeal. It implements tabbed browsing features very well with no dearth of customizable add-on plugins that make this browser virtually synonymous with the Net and relegates all others to play second fiddle. If you pre¬fer browsing through Web pages while remaining omine, WinHTTrack lets you do just that by downloading an entire website on to your hard disk and let you view its contents omine at your leisure.

Free Download Manager integrates well with most browsers and has advanced automation features; and offers noticeably high down¬load speeds too. BitTorrent clients have been around for a while, however, none com¬pare to uTorrent, a fully-fea¬tured file transfer client with minimal system resource footprint. Webmasters and site operators will appreciate tools like SmartFTP which is a powerful FTP manager, highly customizable to a degree that allows site-to-site transfer, background file transferring and scheduling. Email and Messaging: An email client that gives Microsoft Outlook a run for its money is Mozilla's open source, cross-platform can¬didate known as Thunderbird. Improved security includes phishing protec¬tion, ability to disallow images from entering your inbox, and robust junk-mail filters.

Feature rich and very well equipped with customization options like Firefox, Thunderbird flies high and overshadows all others. Skype remains the definitive tool for voice messaging, including making phone calls over the Internet. Tril¬lian is an all-in-one text messaging and chat program for AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo Messenger and IRC, and supports encrypted messag¬ing, group chats, file trans¬fers and lot more.
Activity Monitoring and Security: Naomi is a free Web filtering application, featur¬ing a content control mechanism to protect kids from online abuse. It doesn't just keep track of visited web-sites or chat programs but filters the entire Internet traffic passing through the computer in real-time and blocks out obscene, porno¬graphic, and other unwanted materials from being accessed.

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Similarly, for protection against rogue software that installs itself unknowingly even if you aren't viewing any website, a firewall program is a must have. ZoneAlarm Free Fire¬wall is an award-winning intrusion detection and blocking tool that secures your PC from hack attacks and other unknown threats. Easy-to-use and install, ZoneAlarm Firewall lets you assign access rights to pro¬grams whenever they try to connect to the Internet, ensuring no one escapes the radar without your permis¬sion. BitMeter 2 is a bandwidth monitoring tool and displays the download and upload speed of your Internet connection as a graph that is fairly accurate. It also has an option to track your Web usage history over a period of time and see how much bandwidth is being consumed. A local HTTP proxy, Proxomitron lets you reclaim your browser and Internet experience.

After installation, you have to change your browser's proxy settings to allow traffic to pass through Prox¬omitron, and with it filters enabled, you can surf the Web with much more authority as it rewrites Web pages as they are displayed. Add-ons and Utilities: You need to have IE7 Pro, if Internet Explorer 7 is your preferred browser. It's an add-on with an exhaustive array of features like recog¬nizing mouse gestures, web accelerator, spell check, inline search, support for Greasemonkey scripts, and more. In a way, it completes IE and makes sure it doesn't miss a trick over other browsers. Ailblock Plus for Firefox should hold you good against most annoying pop-up ads, try it if you haven't already. A shell extension like GmailFS adds a drive letter to your My Computer and enables you to use Gmail's inbox for file storage. You can drag and drop files, which are stored as e-mail attachments, and retrieve them easily.