Having toolbars in a browser can be both frustrating and convenient. On one hand they can often cram a lot of useful functionality into a small area, but on the other hand they eat up precious space that could be used for viewing websites. After all, we know what your browser can look like when you've installed a few too many toolbars.

Most of you probably know that our blog is powered by WordPress, and last week version 2.7 Beta 1 was released for anyone who felt compelled to try it out. In the past I've never used a Beta version of WordPress on this blog, but I normally give them all whirl in a test environment to make sure they don't leave me begging for mercy in the end.

Last week we saw a revamped version of Paint in the third Windows 7 milestone. At the time there weren't any other screenshots available, but it looks as though someone who got their hands on Windows 7 M3 has decided to post some screenshots showing off more of the enhancements.

Google kicked off Labor Day yesterday with a huge announcement. They gave everyone a heads up that sometime today the Google Chrome web browser would be launched for the first time. Needless to say there's been a lot of buzz surrounding the pending release, but will it be able to live up to the hype?

Mozilla has been looking at different ways to optimize the user's experience when they open a new tab in Firefox. By default Firefox is set to display a blank page whenever a new tab is opened, and from there the user normally performs a search or navigates to one of their favorite sites.

One of the things that's always nice to know is what you can remove from your hard drive to quickly regain hard drive space. Maybe there are some enormous games on your computer that you don't play anymore, or files you've downloaded that have never gotten deleted? By using hard drive visualization tools you'll be able to pinpoint exactly what is eating up your hard drive storage.

The open-source file sharing application Shareaza has been going through some tough times lately. They had their domain hijacked by a company called Discordia Ltd. back in December 2007, which is the same company who turned Bearshare and iMesh into paid services. On the Shareaza.com site they then started offering an app called "Shareaza 4" that promotes legal downloads.

The last few Alpha releases of Ubuntu 8.10 have been a bit controversial because of the dark brown theme, called NewHuman, that it was shipping by default. Good news for those of you who weren't too fond of that theme...

A few months ago we tried out Digsby, and our verdict was that it's one of the best cross-network messenger clients available. The only downside was that when it came to the performance of Digsby things weren't so pleasant.

Songbird is a media player that I've had a lot of faith in ever since I took a look at it back at version 0.2. The fact that users create extensions just like in Firefox gave the perception that it would become very successful, but for awhile development had slowed down considerably.