No matter how good your browser is, there's
always something that could be that little bit better. Here, we suggest a plug-in
that might help make your life that little bit easier.
Audacity for Windows 2.0.2 RC4
Free-to-use audio editing suite Audacity is
fast taking its place as one of the crown jewels in the open-source crown, more
than capable of stealing users from any paid-for suite. The most recent release
packs in a number of bug fixes including selection toolbar improvements, the removal
of a mixer board crash bug, removal of WAV/AIFF export bugs and improvements in
the normalization effects.
But that's not all that's been done! New
features added in this release include support for custom keyboard shortcuts, a
new 'Paulstretch' effect for slowing down sounds without changing their pitch, a
selection of new preference options (including the ability to reset all preferences
to default when installing) and the removal of CleanSpeech support. Oh, and if
you're interested, the Serbian translation has been completed for both Latin and
Cyrillic character sets. There don't appear to be any major issues with this
Audacity beta, so feel free to use it as soon as you're ready!
Firefox 15 Beta 5
www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/beta
It's been a while since we looked at Firefox's
latest update, and there are some big changes that have occurred in the world's
second most popular desktop browser. The biggest of these - currently a beta-only
feature - is native PDF support. If you're not sure why that's such a huge
change, let us phrase it this way: it means you won't have to use Adobe Reader
anymore. For now it's exclusive to users of the Beta and Aurora channels, so
that's the only way you'll be able see it, but trust us, it's worth seeing.
Less exciting feature additions include
support for the SPDY networking protocol (version 3), improvements to WebGL
(including texture compression for better performance), memory optimization for
add-on and plug-ins, and a variety of updates to the developer environment. If
you're interested, the developer changes are mainly around improving the
debugging tools, but the ability to quickly switch between desktop and mobile
sites while creating webpages is a welcome new feature.
Under the hood, you get the expected appearance
of some new HTML5 features, such as native support for the Opus audio codec,
the addition of the 'media' attribute to the source element, and the addition of
the 'played' attribute to audio and video elements. Known issues include a crash
while launching a locked profile and, more worryingly, slower scrolling in Gmail
- something that may affect you. If you're a heavy Gmail user, you may want to skip
this until that's fixed. Otherwise, it's worth getting, if only to see the PDF update!
Comment Blocker (Firefox)
www.commentblocker.org
There's a rule that states you should never
read the bottom half of the internet. All of us know why. Although one or two sane
voices creep in, the majority of comments are abusive, prejudiced and willfully
ignorant - and yet it's so hard not to get sucked in. As popular web comic XKCD
pointed out, sometimes it's hard to step away the computer when someone is wrong
on the internet.
Comment Blocker can prevent this unfortunate
situation from occurring by stripping news articles and blog posts of their
comments sections, seamlessly rebuilding the web page with the elements removed.
If you want to retain the comments on a specific website, it's possible to set up
a whitelist, and if you're only interested in removing the comments from certain
sites, you can use a blacklist instead.
Preferences are located within the Firefox add-ons
manager and allow you to choose the location of the plug-in's on-screen identifier
(address bar or add-on bar), as well as the behavior that occurs when you click
on it with any mouse button - you can toggle its behavior on the fly, setting it
to whitelist mode, blacklist mode, adding sites or disabling the plug-in entirely.
Advanced users can add sites in the form of simple regular expressions, and the
use of wildcards makes it easy even for beginners to block comments from entire
domains.
With its simple design and behavior, there's
something enjoyably easy about Comment Blocker, and it's not long before you stop
missing the baying mob at the end of every article. It may not be actively useful,
but in terms of saving your sanity, there's little we can recommend more.
