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Browserling is a new cross browser testing web application built with stackVM. They run IE 5.5, 6, 7, 8, 9, FireFox, Opera, and Safari instances on their servers, and you can use these browsers remotely through a virtual machine inside Google Chrome on your local machine. So unlike browsershots.org (which is free or something for-pay like LitmusApp) which just sends you back screenshots of your specified web page as seen in different browsers, Browserling actually lets you interact with the web page. But...
I haven't been able to get it to work. Or, rather, it works, but it shows me a random page rather than the one I request. So not very useful on that count. Hopefully they get it worked out because this would be a really great tool.
HTTPS-everywhere is a FireFox extension from the EFF that helps secure a limited number of popular sites which already support some form of encryption over HTTPS by rewriting links in page to always use HTTPS. In other words, some popular sites like Gmail, Wikipedia, and Facebook, allow you to use HTTPS to browse securely, but they make it a tiny bit difficult by not always defaulting to HTTPS. So some links on a secure page will point to other parts of the site using regular HTTP. The HTTPS-everywhere extension will rewrite such links to help you stay connected securely.
Bunch of front end links for my own uses (and so I can finally close some of the 50+ tabs I have open). I'm doing a lot more client side stuff lately, especially using jquery. I still hate fiddling with HTML and CSS, but not nearly as much as I used to, and javascript is sort of fun although I'm not nearly as comfortable there as in PHP on the server. In any case:
Markup.io - super clever bookmarklet that lets you draw on any webpage, and then share your results. Great for communicating while tweaking web page design.
Common security mistakes in web applications, and the ha.ckers.org cross site scripting cheat sheet. You have to understand this stuff if you are building web apps.
jQuery.pidCrypt - a jQuery plugin to impliment the pidCrypt library
SVG-edit - web-based, Javascript-driven SVG editor that works in any modern browser. Link is to a demo - pretty fun to play around with. Not going to replace illustrator, but it is pretty amazing what can be built in modern browsers.
Zoom-info - pretty simple jQuery image effect that I happen to like. Also Rocketbar, persistent headers and footers, from the same place.
jQuery BBQ - simple, yet powerful bookmarkable #hash history. There are many different implementations of this idea, but this seems to be the most complete. And, sort of humerously, jQuery starwipe, from the same place. From the page:
With jQuery Star Wipe you can enable the single best transition ever created, the star wipe, in any recent WebKit browser!....Only works in modern browsers, but indeed, probably the single best page transition ever.
Why do I need this plugin?
If you even have to ask, then you don’t need it. In fact, you’re not even allowed to look at the live example. Just go away, now.
Protocol relative URL from Paul Irish. Helps with the problem when creating pages with image links when you don't know whether the page will be on http: or https:. It's amazing to me that there is always some other cool trick that I have never heard of before.
jQuery Face Detection (like the technology behind tagging people in FaceBook.)
And finally, one server side piece of goodness: Google's mod_pagespeed for Apache:
...[A] module for the Apache HTTP Server called mod_pagespeed to perform many speed optimizations automatically. We’re starting with more than 15 on-the-fly optimizations that address various aspects of web performance, including optimizing caching, minimizing client-server round trips and minimizing payload size. We’ve seen mod_pagespeed reduce page load times by up to 50% (an average across a rough sample of sites we tried) -- in other words, essentially speeding up websites by about 2x, and sometimes even faster.