What software are critical for surfing the web?

The only "critical" things I would say are, a AntiVirus program and Anti-malware/Spyware in place.


Adobe Flash player is something you'll certainly want. Its used for many things. Especially Video playback, such as YouTube Videos.

Beyond that, there wont really be anything critical for surfing the Web.

Adobes Flash will usually play most everything.
With a few exceptions, such as Netflix, that may use Silverlight.

Silverlight is OK, its from Microsoft. You can read more about it & download the plug in here. http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/
You may not have a need for this however.

~~Just be careful of anyplace that asks you to install extra codecs or download anything in order to watch a video.

The alrge majority you will run into will be Adobe, and a few may be Silverlight.

Elixxir- Running your browser of choice in Sandboxie will keep all of its activity on a separate part of your computer's drive so that nothing can be transfered to the computer without your express permission and everything contained in the Sandbox can be deleted or overwritten at any time including any Malware that it might contain.

~Maxx~

If you have 2 GB ram or more I'd say get a Chromium nightly build as it's lightning fast both off the HD and rendering. It requires very few extensions to do what you need:

Index of /f/chromium/snapshots/chromium-rel-xp


I'm running build 85390 on a PC with only 2 GB ram and it flies.