I spend a lot of time in my web browser, and I’ll bet you do, too. With the amount of time I spend there, I need widgets and add-ons that make my life easier and add value.I wanted to share these four time-savers and life-enhancers with you. They take just a few seconds to click and download – enjoy!

CLICK&CLEAN
Clearing your cache, cookies and browsing history is something we all know we need to do regularly, but unless you’ve clicked your settings to do this automatically, navigating through a bunch of windows to clear your cache means it doesn’t happen very often. Free add on Click&Clean lets you do it all with one easy click.

GHOSTERY
Everything you do on the web is being tracked. The pages you look at, how long you stay on each page, and where you move on to based on what you learn. Those sidebar advertisements that have the very shirt you just searched for an hour ago aren’t just a happy coincidence. As a professional researcher working with confidential data, I have to protect my client’s information. So I use Ghostery, a free add-on doesn’t allow sites to install web bugs, cookies or other tracking devices unless I exempt them. Ghostery works in the background and shows me who would have tracked me if I didn’t have it. When one of my usual go-to sites generated a list of 14 trackers and web bugs, my eyebrows nearly hit my hairline.

SENDTOKINDLE
I love my Kindle, but sometimes it’s a real pain to get non-Amazon things on it. Enter SendToKindle, a Firefox add-in that allows you to grab blog posts, articles, and other web things onto your Kindle for easy reading when you’re on the beach, a plane, or anywhere else that doesn’t have web access…yet.

(ALMOST) AWESOME SCREENSHOT
This app is called Awesome Screenshot, and if it was working perfectly at the moment it would be completely awesome. Once you load the app, Awesome Screenshot allows you one-click access to grab all or part of a web page to highlight sections, draw arrows and circles around text or pictures, blur out sensitive or confidential information, and save a copy of the image. Normally it allows you to save a copy of your work right to your hard drive, but until they upgrade it you will need to save your work at their site. You simply visit the link they provide and right-click on the image to save it. It’s a small workaround for such a great, free app. I used it to capture the screenshots of add-ins for this blog post.

What’s MY NEW CRUSH?
You’ll have to visit HBG’s Facebook page to find out! If you’re a Google Reader or iGoogle fanatic like me (and even if you’re not), I think you’re really going to like it! (And speaking of ‘Like’ing things, why don’t you ‘Like’ our Facebook page while you’re there? We use our FB page to post quick tips, useful links and other great stuff!)