Due to request, here is a Debian installer file for Firefox 3.6; You may or may not have to remove your old version of Firefox, in which case it would be a good idea to save your bookmarks before attempting to upgrade. Write back in the comment section with feedback/suggestions.

32-Bit Firefox 3.6 Linux Installer

Firefox 3.6  is built on Mozilla’s Gecko 1.9.2 web rendering platform, which has been under development since early 2009 and contains many improvements for web developers, add-on developers, and users. This version is also faster and more responsive than previous versions and has been optimized to run on small device operating systems such as Maemo.

The list is compiled from the CNET Top 5 Free Software video.

#5 – GIMP

GIMP running in Windows XP

GIMP (The GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free software raster graphics editor. It is primarily employed as an image retouching and editing tool, as well as offering freeform drawing and retouching tools, GIMP can accomplish essential image workflow steps such as resizing, editing, and cropping photos, combining multiple images, and converting between different image formats.

GIMP can also be used to create basic animated images in the GIF format. At present GIMP is entirely suitable for amateur or professional work with images intended for viewing on monitors and printing on inkjet printers.

Download: http://www.gimp.org/downloads/

#4 -HandBrake

HandBrake 0.9.3 in Windows

HandBrake is a free open-source program designed to convert MPEG video (including DVD-Video) into a MPEG-4 video file in .mp4, .avi, .ogm, or .mkv containers. The program is used by many people to convert DVDs into other forms so they can be viewed on iPods, iPhones and with the Mac QuickTime Player.

Originally developed for BeOS, HandBrake is now cross-platform, and available for Linux, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Solaris. As it is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License, HandBrake is free software.

Download: http://handbrake.fr/downloads.php

#3 – Firefox

Firefox 3.5 in Vista

Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. A Net Applications survey put Firefox at 24.07% of the recorded usage share of web browsers as of October 2009, making it the second most popular browser in terms of current use worldwide after Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Latest Firefox features include tabbed browsing, spell checking, incremental find, live bookmarking, a download manager, private browsing, location-aware browsing (aka “geolocation”) based exclusively on a Google service and an integrated search system that uses Google by default in most localizations. Functions can be added through add-ons, created by third-party developers, of which there is a wide selection, a feature that has attracted many of Firefox’s users.

Download: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/firefox.html

#2 – OpenOffice

OpenOffice.org Writer in XP

OpenOffice.org (OO.o or OOo), commonly known as OpenOffice, is an office application suite available for a number of different computer operating systems. It is distributed as free software and written using its own GUI toolkit. It supports the ISO/IEC standard OpenDocument Format (ODF) for data interchange as its default file format, as well as Microsoft Office formats among others. As of November 2009, OpenOffice supports over 110 languages.

Download: http://download.openoffice.org/

And finally… #1 – VLC Media Player

VLC in the new Windows 7

VLC media player is an open source, free software media player and multimedia framework written by the VideoLANproject.

VLC is a portable multimedia player, encoder, and streamer supporting many audio and video codecs and file formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It is able to stream over networks and to transcode multimedia files and save them into various formats. VLC used to stand for VideoLAN Client, but that meaning is nowdeprecated.

It is one of the most platform-independent players available, with versions for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux,BeOS, Syllable, BSD, MorphOS, Solaris and Sharp Zaurus, and is widely used with over 324,609,909 downloads for all versions as of 07 November 2009.

Download: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Proprietary software helps you maximize your Internet experience, but is not open source. The software available includes Multimedia Codecs, Java Runtime Environment, and plug-ins for Firefox.

The Ubuntu Restricted Extras will install Adobe Flash Player, Java Runtime Environment with Firefox plug-ins, a set of Microsoft Fonts (msttcorefonts), multimedia codecs (w32codecs or w64codecs), mp3-compatible encoding (lame), FFMpeg, extra Gstreamer codecs, the package for DVD decoding (libdvdread3), and the unrar archiver.

To install, open a terminal and type:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

And that’s it, with that one simple command you can now listen to MP3s, play DVDs, and much more.

Here’s a guide for broadband users that will really speed Firefox up:
(Please note that this is only useful for broadband users, if you have dial-up, there is no need to follow this guide)

1.Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:

network.http.pipelining

network.http.proxy.pipelining

network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.

2. Alter the entries as follows:

Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”

Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”

Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0?. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.

And that’s it, If you’re using a broadband connection you’ll load pages much faster now.