Computer applications are expensive and often have a lot of features that we don’t really need. On the contrary, free applications often do one specific task and are simpler to use.

There are tons of free applications available on the web. So, it is hard to find the ones that suit our needs. I have tried a lot of them before in order to find what I need. In this article, I would like to share my best 10 free applications with you. If you are satisfied by other free applications not listed below, please leave me a comment to let us know about them. Here are my best 10 free software:

• avast! 4 Home Edition www.avast.com
  It is slick and supports so-called skins, allowing users to change the appearance of the application interface. It scans files on demand and on access, including e-mail attachments. It does not have scheduling.
• EditPad Lite www.editpadpro.com
  EditPad Lite has a lot of good features that you cannot find in Notepad such as tabbed interface for editing multiple files, line numbering, auto-­indenting, and printing blocks of text.
• OpenOffice www.openoffice.org
  Microsoft Office is too expensive. Use OpenOffice instead. It includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation application, diagramming tool and database.
• FileZilla filezilla.sourceforge.net
  FileZilla supports Secure FTP, SSL, and other protocols. It has a tree-structured site manager that lets you store settings for multiple sites. You can set speed limits which can prevent download quotas from being triggered on networks that monitor bandwidth usage.
• Foxit Reader www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php
  Adobe Reader can slow down older computers. Foxit Reader lets you view your PDF documents without the Adobe bloat. It runs fast either as a standalone application or within your browser.
• Google Desktop desktop.google.com
  Google Desktop has a large collection of widgets for displaying weather, news, file searches, Gmail, translation services.
• GIMP www.gimp.org
  GIMP is an excellent graphics manipulation package and a good alternative to expensive Photoshop.
• Firefox www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
  It is the award-winning Web browser from Mozilla because it is fast, secure and totally customizable by using themes and extensions created by its users. With the power of the open source community behind it, Firefox will likely remain ahead of its competitors.
• Mozilla Sunbird www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/sunbird
  It is a cross-platform calendar application, built upon Mozilla Toolkit. It provides you with full-featured and easy to use calendar application that you can use around the world.
• IrfanView www.irfanview.com
  IrfanView is a very fast, small, compact and innovative graphic viewer for Windows. It is simple for beginners and powerful for professionals.

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Firefox is very popular because it is fast and secure. Also, it is an open source project where thousands of independent programmers can work on finding security holes before they are exploited.

Even though Internet Explorer comes integrated with Windows, Firefox is almost half the size of Internet Explorer. So, downloading it is faster than downloading Internet Explorer. Besides, a typical web page will get loaded faster on Firefox than Internet Explorer.

Another thing that I like Firefox more than Internet Explorer is that it is customizable by using Firefox Add-ons.

This is the list of add-ons that I like the most:

• Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer
  You just need to install Foxmarks on each of your computers, and it will work silently in the background to keep your bookmarks synchronized.
• ScribeFire
  ScribeFire (previously known as Performancing for Firefox) is a full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog.
• All-in-One Sidebar
  It lets you quickly switch between sidebar panels, view dialog windows such as downloads, extensions, and more in the sidebar, or view source or websites in the sidebar.
• Google Calendar Notifier
  It notifies you the events from your Google Calendar.
• Google Reader Notifier
  It shows you how many unread items you have in your Google Reader account.
• WebMail Notifier
  It checks your webmail accounts and notifies the number of unread emails. It supports gmail, yahoo mail, hotmail, daum, naver, empas, nate and more. You can use multiple accounts in the same host.
• FasterFox
  It is a performance and network tweaks for Firefox. I really like it because it makes Firefox run much faster.
• Google Toolbar
  It adds a Google toolbar to Firefox. If you search through Google a lot, you must install it.
• FireFTP
  It turns Firefox into a FTP Client.
• GMail Space
  It acts as an online drive, so you can upload files from your hard drive and access them from every Internet capable system. The interface will make your Gmail account look like a FTP host.
• FireBug
  It integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.
• IE Tab
  I use Firefox almost all of the time. However, when I need to test new pages or view those rare but interesting IE-only pages, I find this add-on very useful and convenient because I can see what these pages look like in IE.

The above list is just my favorite add-ons. If you are using some add-ons that are not in the above list and you find them useful, please leave a comment to share them with us. Thank you.

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