"Free as in beer", meaning, of course, free to use, but not open source. In this case, it's a couple of tools which are handy as adjuncts to both Firefox and Chrome.

For years I've been following Nir Sofer, author of a whole slew of beer-free utilities under the "NirSoft" label. They cost nothing to download and use, don't need to be installed, and make a perfect addition to something like a PortableApps pack. A few of his tools in particular caught my eye for this blog:

- ChromeCacheView, which lets you browse and dump the contents of the Chrome cache
- MozillaCacheView, which does the same for Firefox
- PasswordFox, for retrieving passwords from Firefox's stored-password repository
- MozillaCookiesView, for browsing Firefox cookies

The only mildly frustrating thing about these tools is the licensing, although Mr. Sofer does have a few utilities with full source code included. But for the vast majority of scenarios for these tools, and all the others in his library, his free-to-use and free-to-distribute license is probably more than enough.

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