Firefox 5.0 Excellent 5.0 totally best!

Put the phrase 'awesome bar' into your favorite search best-ever engine to find out more!

Firefox has delivered straight-forward extensibility and efficient performance in its various iterations. This new release landing page drivel about an awesome bar is not what a Firefox user wants to be looking at. A feature highlight that is

a)old news

b)uninformative
is not the Firefox I'm used to and it's not awesome.

Help systray help you

The windows taskbar has changed a lot over the years, and more so the start menu, but ever since Windows 95 brought me the System Tray, I've been glancing at the bottom right corner of my screen to see what's running.

Back in those days, if you closed a window, you closed the program.  Even the most ignorant user today probably knows that's not always the case anymore, but on the flip side, even the most savvy user is fighting a constant battle against monopoware that thinks it really ought to be running all the time.  A good interface includes the option to close, minimize, or minimize to system tray (notification area) when you hit the x.  Winamp and even (monopoware) iTunes are a couple of examples.  It's a great place for stuff that you like to keep running in the not-quite-background; you get more space for your foreground stuff in the taskbar.  It's not there to be a place for Skype and Steam to hide when you think you've closed them, though.  Or maybe you just don't care and you want to hide them all...

To the point:  Windows 7's system tray has that little arrow on the left side of the icons.  Click it and you'll find all those always-on programs, hit customize and you can set their behaviors.

An example of each of the three settings.

Now I know when Steam and Soluto are running on their own (the worst of these wares like iTunes and Skype will even reset this after some updates).  Now my antivirus and Windows update won't take up space on the bar unless I need to know something.

CDisplay: lighter & easier than paper & ink

If you've got any .cbr/.cbz files on your drive, then you've probably already got a viewer you like.  I've yet to find a bad one, but on the off-chance that your viewer could do more (less?) for you, I'd like to introduce & recommend CDisplay.

CDisplay is a free sequential image viewer.  The application is small and the phrase "easy to use" makes it sound more complicated than it is.  The blank screen you get when you run CDisplay is accompanied by a little tool-tip that tells you everything you need to know to get started.  Everything great about CDisplay is at your fingertips when you right-click, including CDisplay's "Load Next File" (Shift+L) for when you want to go seamlessly from issue 12 to 13.

Before you do anything, hit C for config.  Mouse Control options are presented with a function drop down for each type of mouse button use: single-left click to triple middle-click, which makes a lot more sense to me than vice versa.  The Image Sizing options are pretty comprehensive; On my laptop I use "fit width if oversized" and "suppress for double pages," while on my desktop I also use "fit height" to avoid scrolling.  Finally, program settings include "Japanese mode" (ctrl+J) for manga display.

It's true, there's nothing mindblowing about these features when you compare CDisplay to Comical or iOS Comixology, but accessing and using the customization features of CDisplay is one of the most straight-forward, no-nonsense experiences you can have on a PC today, and with such great focus on allowing you to set the controls that feel natural to you, I promise you'll only configure CDisplay ONCE.

CDisplay, like most if not all of its competition, allows for multiple favorite directories (rather than restrictive single-location libraries a la iTunes), and bookmarks, but this is one of those rare times where non-invasive usage-assumptions really shine: 

Open up CDisplay
Hit R
Resume reading right where you left off.

The whole website.  Note the lack of Comic Sans.

CDisplay's website is another breath of fresh-air.  None of the bloat of sites for wares that exist as platforms for file-pull sales.  Instead? A link.  Maybe you went to get CDisplay and found it wasn't for you (or your OS).  Links to alternative viewers.  These links even include CDisplayEx, which covers more formats than just rar- & zip-based formats .cbr & .cbz as well as a handful of other languages. 

CDisplay isn't great because of what it can do.  It's great because of how it does it.  Setup & config are quick and powerful, and CDisplay's tool-tips and lack of chrome are respectful and refreshing.