Rejoicement! The Poorhouse has previously mentioned his distaste of massively long lame-application-filled Facebook pages, where the only interesting bit - the wall - is right at the bottom. It's a particular problem when corporate race-booking. It's hard enough to disguise Facebook as work as it is without massive colourful pirates shouting "Shiver me timbers!", a picture of a toilet roll counting how many people you peed on and the lads-mag-esque illustration that is the output of FilthBook. You know who you are.

Solution? Use your web browser to hide it all.

Geeks! Who doesn't love their RSS fix of the day? Web-based aggregators are clearly the way to go, allowing you browse the inane jibber of the blogosphere from the confines of your wifi-enabled bed and during skive-time at work without getting all de-synchronised. Google Reader is one of the Poorhouse's favourite examples of this, and it just gets even better if you add on the Google Reader Preview Enhanced script.

Elite web surfers: the virtues of using the 'fox as opposed to Internet Explorer to surf away have been discussed many a time before - mainly to do with the many extensions you can add on to it to make it super useful. Yet to feature on the Poorhouse however is the number one essential reason to get it right now.

Two words: Stop and Hammertime.

Well, for far too long when that immense webpage full of a certain type of photographs has refused to download within the hour, you've had to reach for a dull red stop sign, X or other such tedious and predictable iconic representation of "stop" stuck at the top of your boring web browser. No longer!

Yet another handy Firefox extension worship session! Surely soon Firefox will take over the world and eradicate all other sources of software.

This time, it's WebMailCompose. The email services you access over the web (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo et al.) are cool in many ways, but they traditionally have quite some limitations compared to desktop clients. Many are being circumvented by wonderous AJAX and other new-skool technologies, but one that can't be controlled by the webmail software itself is the mailto issue.

Firefox keeps on ruling. Even if it wasn't so great in itself, the sheer number of handy add-ons means it's indispensable for serious web-work. The latest and greatest to enter the Poorhouse most-useful collection is AnEC - "Add and Edit Cookies".

How many nights have you laid awake wondering how can i expend even less energy surfing the net?
Well worry no longer because firefox has done it again.

All-in-one gestures is a firefox extension that allows you to control the web browser without all that pesky moving to click a button.

You simply hold down the menu button on the mouse and draw a litle line and it translates the little line and does what you want. For example a line travelling left would take you back a page and a line travelling forwards would take you forward a page. Up and left or right to navigate through the tabbed windows.

Heavens above, more ways to avoid web and email irritation. The Poorhouse is most frustrated when, before viewing some web page or downloading a file where the content is free and open to the public, your email address is demanded. Worse yet when you can't just type nonsense in as you then have to go check it in order to click on a link to confirm you are a real person - who can be sent adverts for Viagra.

It is often acceptable to demand some confirmation that you actually exist and are contactable in circumstances where you are going to be publishing content or paying money (for instance a web forum, or subscriber-only content) but for idle browsing it is just downright irritating to have to fill in a form, go check your email and so on for ostensibly no good reason - other than to let the site owner have your email address so they can email you "special offers" and the like.

Another wonder-feature Firefox web browser extension is Greasemonkey. This addon gives unprecedented power to web surfers, and could be the bane of their life to website authors.

The deal is this: when you go to read a web page, the Internet doesn't magically transmit a photo-esque lights and sound image to your computer for display. Rather it sends a bunch of boring code, mostly revolving around HTML. The web browser program on your computer reads this code and builds up the visual representation of the page to display to lucky you - the end user. So what? Well, there is nothing to stop you altering the code before it is displayed - which is exactly what this Greasemonkey does.

An exCSSively useful menuIn recent times, the Poorhouse has gained a new favourite extension for Firefox. The Web Developer extension, which works on Firefox, Flock, Mozilla and Seamonkey web browsers contains far-too-numerous to list that aid the creation of one's own pages, and dare it be suggested the deconstruction of other people's pages - all in the name of research naturally.

A few favourite features include the ability to immediately disable various features of pages such as redirects, Javascript etc., validate any code under various standards, manipulate forms and images, resize the browser window to standard screen-size resolutions and a whole host of information gathering / layout visualising options.