We spend a lot of time swapping tips with geeks. Here’s our list of our favourite, free, open source downloads that have made our lives easier, so we want to share them with you.

Browsers

Want curvy corners (to name one CSS3 feature), speed and security? Ditch Internet Explorer and explore the web with the alternatives:

Mozilla Firefox - Our favorite browser, tons of great add-ons (see the next section), support for HTML5 and CSS3, spell checking, decent download manager, secure and much more.

Google Chrome - If you don't need all the add-ons for Firefox, then Google's browser is fast and lightweight, simple to use and secure. There are also new add-ons being created all the time.

Firefox Add Ons

ColorZilla - Advanced Eyedropper, Color Picker, Palette Viewer and other colorful goodies for your Firefox.

Spell checker - Checks spelling in web forms as you type.

Xmarks Bookmark and Password Sync – Xmarks is the #1 bookmarking add-on. Keep your bookmarks, passwords and open tabs backed up and synchronized across computers and browsers. Search smarter with website ratings and reviews displayed with your search results.

Flagfox - Displays a country flag depicting the location of the current web-site's server and provides a multitude of tools such as site safety checks, whois, translation, similar sites, validation, URL shortening, and more...

Firebug - integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page...

The Web Developer extension - adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.

QuickFox Notes - QuickFox Notes is a multi-tab note taking add-on for Firefox that uses the integrated bookmarks system to store the notes. Therefore, a bookmarks synchronization add-on (e.g. Xmarks) can be used to synchronize notes between computers.

Taboo - If you keep tons of tabs open because you want to continue reading them later, Taboo is for you. Taboo lets you save a page for later.

Rock your Firefox - In case the above is not enough, check out this site for more!

Graphics

Gimp is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of open source software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages and is a free alternative to software such as Photoshop.

Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.

IconFinder - Tens of thousands of Icons, many avaible for free

PC Tools

Gizmo's Freeware is a non-commercial community website staffed entirely by volunteers.

Password Generator allows you to create random passwords that are highly secure and extremely difficult to crack or guess due to an optional combination of lower and upper case letters, numbers and punctuation symbols.

Web Trends

Internet world stats - is an International website that features up to date world Internet Usage, Population Statistics and Internet Market Research Data, for over 233 individual countries and world regions.

The global top 500 websites as provided by Alexa, the web information company.

Trends in browser usage, what are the most common browsers, operating systems, screen resolutions and color depths?

Web designer / developer tools

FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface.

HTML character codes - HTML decimal codes, character entities and hex codes.

W3C Markup Validation Service - XHTML Validator

W3C CSS Validation Service - CSS Validator

XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use - just download, extract and start.

MySQL tools - This is where you can download the MySQL GUI Tools Bundle for 5.0.

W3Schools - free tutorials in all web development technologies.

Website Test behind the Great Firewall of China - Test any website in real-time to check if it is accessible from China.

RegExLib.com, the Internet's first Regular Expression Library. Currently we have indexed 3010 expressions from 1771 contributors around the world.

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s.

Text Fixer Text to HTML - Convert plain text from an email, a .txt file or any similar text source into html code that can be published on a web page.

QR Mobile Bar Code Generator from the ZXing Project.

Animated preloaders - 3D and more.

Balsamiq Mockups for wireframing - Using Mockups feels like drawing, but because it's digital, you can tweak and rearrange easily. Teams can come up with a design and iterate over it in real-time in the course of a meeting.

CSS Border Radius - Generates the moz and webkit code, quick and easy with a visual representation, not in IE though!

Cool Tools and Toys for Web Developers - The one we use most are the CSS3 generators for Shadows, The gradients one is great, but IE is holding us back still on that one...