Adobe’s Flash technology is pretty much THE standard when it comes to delivering video over the Internet. A number of high profile sites like YouTube, hulu and metacafe use flash to display content to their users and the flash plugin is quickly becoming a must have for every computer user.

Flash is not being used just for videos, it is also used around the Internet for creating casual games, advertisements and pretty much anything that you can think of.

In spite of all the advantages of the Flash platform, the problem with flash is that other than Windows, it really doesn’t run well on any other platform. Flash is also a notoriously heavy user of your system’s resources.

If you’re a Linux or OS X user like I am, you can forget about timely updates and can also expect your browser’s memory and CPU usage to go through the roof if you like visiting flash heavy websites. In my opinion, that is reason enough to get rid of Flash.

So, what do you do if you’ve had enough of the flash advertisements and videos making an appearance on every website that you visit ?

You give ClickToFlash a try !

If you have a web site or blog, you probably rely on web analytics to understand about your visitors. It provides a way for you to know

1. How they found your site
2. The items on your site they find interesting and
3. Location information about your visitors.

The best known and most widely used web analytics tool is Google Analytics. There are over 80 reports that can be accessed to track and analyze the health of your web site/blog. Additionally, it also has an ad hoc reporting function that allows you to further tailor these 80 reports, or create your own from scratch. There are other tasks that allow you to monitor vistors’ paths on your site/blog, monitor your AdWords, group similar visits together, etc. What if you were able to extend the functions that Google Analytics offer? There is a Firefox add-on that will allow you to do that. It’s called the Better Google Analytics Firefox Extension.

How would you like to be able to customize the layout of the Google homepage? How about add better video controls and a download button to YouTube? Or set a profanity filter that works across all websites? Maybe remove all the “What type of leafy vegetable are you?” quizzes from Facebook? These are very few of the things that can be done with Greasemonkey.

By itself, Greasemonkey does essentially nothing. At least, nothing that you as a user would notice. To really use it, you download Greasemonkey scripts which all have some special purpose. For example, right now I’m writing this from a browser with Greasemonkey installed, and I’m using scripts to enhance YouTube, Facebook, and Google Images.

If you are bothered that you can’t create html signature in Gmail or other web-based email accounts, WiseStamp could probably be the answer to your problem.

WiseStamp is a Firefox extension that allows you to create and insert rich HTML signature for your Web-based email accounts, including Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL mail. After you have installed and get it running, you can create your own signature with a rich text editor and optionally, fill in your social network detail and get them to show up in your signature.

Whenever Firefox releases a new update/version, some of the extensions are bound to break. Similarly, in Songbird, when I upgraded to the latest 0.7 version, some of my favorite extensions are no longer working. While we are waiting for the developers to fix them up, here are some of the useful extensions that still work in Songbird 0.7

If you have not try out Songbird, here is a quick and easy way to install Songbird on your Ubuntu machine.