Today, a moment of respite from the standard self-aggrandizing to aggrandize on behalf of two very good pieces of software I stumbled across in the past few months, both of which have since made my time online vastly more enjoyable:

The first, Mozilla’s FireFox web browser (previously code-named Firebird). If the constant security flaws of IE (or your latent desire to stick it to Microsoft) aren’t enough to tempt you over to the non-profit browser initiative formed in the wake of Netscape, features like tabbed browsing certainly should be. Come to a link in the middle of a page you’re reading that you’d like to check out once you’re done with the current page? Control click the link, and the new page loads behind the active one on a separate tab within the same window. If, like me, you frequently juggle multiple pages, it will make your life incalculably easier. Throw in pop-up blocking, integrated search, and improved navigation, bookmarks and downloads, and you’ve got the recipe for a nearly perfect browser.

Plus, their new logo rocks the proverbial Kasbah:

The second, then, is Knowspam.net. In the past month, 12,229 pieces of spam were sent to me. Literally none of them made it through to my inbox. I’ve finally started to again think of email as a useful tool. The process is simple. People you know can send email through directly; people you don’t, when they mail for the first time, have to click through to a web page to demonstrate they’re real humans rather than spamming robots. As the software allows you to upload your email address book, and pulls email addresses from outgoing messages, you’ll only harass people emailing you completely out of the blue, and then only once. Slightly obnoxious, but in my mind a reasonably price to pay for keeping 100% of the spam from you inbox.

They don’t have a cool logo. But you should sign up anyway.