Handy tools to improve your browsing experience

Sometimes your browsing experience can be frustrating because it gets ruined by unreachable sites, choppy YouTube or other Flash videos, annoying pop-up ads and other issues, but you can solve them for good by using specific tools.

1. Down for everyone or just for me: This helpful tool can check on the status of a website. If you enter a URL, the tool's able to tell whether it's really down or it's only a problem with your computer. In the figure below you can see an example for a website that was actually down:
2. Change Firefox settings to solve choppy YouTube/Flash video playback: I've already dealt with this topic in my post Speed up video playback on Firefox with a click - no more choppy videos!  I'm going to add here that you can try All You Tube HTML5 add-on, that forces your browser to reproduce all videos in HTML5.
3. Get rid of annoying pop-up ads: Some websites display lots of annoying pop-up ads that sometimes use too much RAM, causing your PC to crash. This isn't only a hassle but can also be a security threat, as some ads run malicious scripts capable of infecting and compromising your PC. To be on top of this, you definitely want to install Adblock Plus.  This browser add-on blocks most ads, preventing them from being even displayed.
4. Prevent homepage hijacking scripts: There are two ways to prevent hijacking scripts from changing your homepage. You can a) disable Java and Flash scripts in your browser by using an add-on such as NoScript or b) have a specific software alerting you when a program wants to change your homepage or add an auto-starting entry. I'm not very big on NoScript, because Internet is no use without Java and Flash support and I don't think that disabling all scripts to prevent malicious ones is very smart (it's a little bit like dumping away a whole basket of apples instead of the only rotten one). A better way to go, in my opinion, is to have an anti-malware program, such as Spybot Search and Destroy, monitor your system in background. If you activate its real-time protection component (called TeaTimer), you'll be warned with a pop-up message when some programs or scripts try to change your homepage, so you'll be able to deny your authorization in case of doubts (here for an example). Another handy small program having this very feature is WinPatrol.
5. Paste an image from your clipboard to the web with a click: I'm present on some answer websites such as Quora and sometimes you want to add an image to your answer, but the way you would normally do it is a hassle (copy an image to your clipboard, save it to a file and then upload it to a server). What if you could copy and paste an image from your clipboard directly to a website? You can use snaggy to do exactly this. Here's an image I've pasted to the website.