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A simple list of the best free and Open Source Software for windows you can download and use. It is not a comprehensive listing of every Open Source windows application; we just want to show the best, most important, and easiest to use software. We hope that this page can be a handy reference and a useful tool for getting more people to trying and start using Open Source software.

Note: Success Webmasters is not associated with any of the Open Source software that is presented below. We take no responsibility for the software or for the content on the websites which may have changed since our last visit. We just want to show alternatives to commercial software and the endless possibilities with Open Source software – even for Windows.

Web Browsers

Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite, managed by the Mozilla Corporation. Firefox had 19.46% of the recorded usage share of web browsers as of September 2008, making it the second-most popular browser in current use worldwide, after Internet Explorer.
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Opera

Opera is not Open Source software but is free for personal use and a great web browser so we think Opera should be included in this list.

Opera is a web browser and Internet suite developed by the Opera Software company. Opera handles common Internet-related tasks such as displaying web sites, sending and receiving e-mail messages, managing contacts, IRC online chatting, downloading files via BitTorrent, and reading web feeds. Opera is offered free of charge for personal computers and mobile phones, but for other devices it is not free.
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SeaMonkey

SeaMonkey is a free, open source, and cross-platform Internet suite. It is the continuation of the former Mozilla Application Suite, based on the same source code. SeaMonkey consists of a web browser (SeaMonkey Navigator), which is a descendant of the Netscape family, an e-mail and news client program, and an HTML editor (SeaMonkey Composer). The development of SeaMonkey is community-driven, in contrast to the Mozilla Application Suite, which until its last released version (1.7.13) was governed by the Mozilla Foundation. The new project-leading group is the SeaMonkey Council.
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Google Chrome

Though quite new, Google’s open source entrance into the Internet browser market shows quite a bit of potential. It is lacking some of the slick add-ons that Firefox features, but its isolated sandbox and ground-up modern build make it a fast alternative that is destined for great things down the road.

At the moment we don’t know if Chrome is collecting user information or not. But some website owners are blocking Chrome from entering their websites just because of that reason.
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Email

Mozilla Thunderbird

Mozilla Thunderbird is a free, open source, cross-platform email and news client developed by the Mozilla Foundation. The project strategy is modeled after Mozilla Firefox, a project aimed at creating a web browser. On December 7, 2004, version 1.0 was released, and received over 500,000 downloads in its first three days of release (and 1,000,000 in 10 days). As of June 2008, Thunderbird has been downloaded more than 67 million times since 1.0 release.
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IM - Instant Messaging

Pidgin

Pidgin can log in to multiple accounts on multiple IM networks simultaneously. This means that you can be chatting with friends on AIM, talking to a friend on Yahoo Messenger, and sitting in an IRC channel all at the same time.

Pidgin supports many features of the various networks, such as file transfer, away messages, and typing notification. It also goes beyond that and provides many unique features. A few popular features are Buddy Pounces, which give the ability to notify you, send a message, play a sound, or run a program when a specific buddy goes away, signs online, or returns from idle; and plugins, consisting of text replacement, a buddy ticker, extended message notification, iconify on away, spell checking, tabbed conversations, and more.
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Office Suites / Word Processing

OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org is a free cross-platform office application suite available for a number of different computer operating systems. 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.

The project and software are informally referred to as OpenOffice, but this term is a trademark held by another party, requiring the project to adopt OpenOffice.org as its formal name.
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AbiWord

AbiWord is a free software word processor. The name "AbiWord" (pronounced "Abby Word") is derived from the root of the Spanish word "abierto", meaning "open".

AbiWord was originally started by SourceGear Corporation as the first component of AbiSuite, as part of a plan to create a full Office Suite that would be free software. However, SourceGear gradually moved on to other business interests, and now the AbiWord project is run by a team of volunteer developers. AbiWord is part of GNOME Office, a collection of office applications with some degree of integration.
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RSS

RSSOwl

Applications that collect data from RSS-compliant sites are called RSS readers or "aggregators." RSSOwl is such an application. RSSOwl lets you gather, organize, update, and store information from any compliant source in a convenient, easy to use interface, save selected information in various formats for offline viewing and sharing, and much more. It's easy to configure, available in many many languages and the best of all: It's platform-independent.
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Video Player / Video Podcasting

Miro

Miro is a free open source application for watching channels of internet video (aka video podcasts and video rss). Miro is easy to use and offers full-screen viewing abilities. You simply "subscribe" to the video (or audio) podcast you want to watch and Miro will then automatically download the latest videos for skipless and stutter-free viewing. You can tell Miro to automatically download the newest videos, only download the ones you wish, and if you’re short on hard drive space you can specify how long the downloaded videos stay on your system before being cleaned up.
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Video Playback

VLC media player

VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player, encoder, and streamer supporting many audio and video codecs and file formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. Basically it can pretty much play whatever you throw at it. Additionally, it is able to stream over networks and to transcode multimedia files and save them into various different formats. It is one of the most platform-independent players available, with versions for BeOS, Syllable, BSD, Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, MorphOS and Solaris, and is widely used with over 100 million downloads.
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MPlayer

MPlayer is a movie player which runs on many systems. Another great feature of MPlayer is the wide range of supported output drivers. MPlayer has an onscreen display (OSD) for status information, nice big antialiased shaded subtitles and visual feedback for keyboard controls.
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The base of this text is researched from different sources. The facts that are presented are checked and double-checked to be as correct and accurate as possible. However, Success Webmasters makes no representations or warranties as to the completeness or accuracy of the information.