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Open Source You Can Use, November Edition

In this edition: two ways to browse the web, and one great way to find everything scattered across all your storage media. Read on.

First, a blast from the past. To be honest, I thought Mozilla's SeaMonkey was a dead project, long since eclipsed by the one-two punch of Firefox and Thunderbird. Turns out it's been very quietly under wraps for a long time now, and has finally reached a 2.0 release (PortableApps version). Fans of the suite claim it's an all-in-one alternative to multiple "bloated" projects, but at this point I suspect the differences between running two relatively lightweight programs vs. running one is not as major as it used to be. What I'm most curious about is not the browser or email client, but the HTML editor. Nice to have something lightweight, powerful and standards-compliant apart from the desperately-underdeveloped KompoZer/Nvu (KompoZer's still being developed, but Nvu -- its original version -- doesn't even have a working website anymore).

Google Chrome fans have most likely been hearing about the 4.0 revision of the browser, which boasts kick-butt JavaScript speeds and has become my preferred way to watch Flash-delivered content (e.g., YouTube). Get the PortableApps version of the 4.0 beta here; it installs side-by-side with the release edition so you don't have to choose between beta or release. Chrome still more has the feel of a 1.3 rather than a 3.0 product at this stage -- no real culture of third-party add-ons yet, which is a big minus -- but the pace of its development is still stunning. A large part of that is almost certainly due to big parts of it being rolled into the as-yet-unseen ChromeOS.

And shame on me for not mentioning VVV before! Virtual Volumes View helps you sort out the mess lurking on offline volumes -- CDs, DVDs, removable drives (USB or otherwise), memory cards, and all the rest. Pop a disc in, and the program automatically catalogs everything on it and indexes it by name for local searching. The program's design is as intelligent as the concept: it requires no handstands to use well. I was using the 0.8 version for some time, but they've released a 1.0 as of earlier this year, and the authors have another program in the works for cataloging images.

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