With plenty of affordable products in their library to help out those who are serious about Web development, Blumentals Software now has an even more impressively priced product: a package of CSS tools that’s absolutely free. The freeware CSS Toolbox includes a handful of helpful tools that should save time for anyone who works with CSS.

The CSS Editor comes with syntax highlighting and simplified auto-complete; the CSS Formatter/Beautifier helps you reformat and prettify your code; the CSS Checker tracks down errors and makes your code old-browser-friendly; and the CSS Compressor makes your code load faster, reducing its size by up to 70 percent. However, if you’re a CSS newbie, you might want to read a few online tutorials before diving in. Only a small amount of knowledge is required before you get started, but that modicum will reap big dividends.

Anyone who wants to clean up or check their CSS should check out this set of useful tools.

A browser’s built-in password database makes it easy to log in to personal or secure sites you visit frequently without having to type in your password each time. But if you use more than one computer (say, one at home and another at work), then you have to enter in your password at least once on each machine. No current browser that I know of lets you synchronize your preferences, like passwords and bookmarks, across multiple installations of their product.

But there are solutions, and they’re getting better. Foxmarks, which has been out for a while with a tool to synchronizes bookmarks across browser installations, on Tuesday took its password sync feature out of beta. The product is a Firefox add-in that works seamlessly and behind the scenes. In its default configuration, every time you exit your Firefox browser, it sends updates of your bookmarks and passwords to a server. When you launch a session, it reads them in. Your database of passwords is protected by a PIN (another password) that it appears Foxmarks has no backdoor to, which is good.

My kind of utility: Set it and forget it.

In use, Foxmarks is completely invisible to the user, which puts it a little ahead of alternate solutions like the Web-based password keeper Passpack, or the software app like Roboform, which uses a database that can be synchronized across multiple machines. On the other hand, Passpack works on any browser, and Roboform supports both Firefox and Internet Explorer. Foxmarks is just for Mozilla browsers like Firefox.

Eventually, browsers will support centralized databases of user preferences and passwords–Microsoft, Mozilla, and Google execs have all told me they’re working on this for the future. In the meantime, if you hate having to manage passwords across multiple computers, Foxmarks has a new solution worth looking at.

Mozilla fans can now play with the anticipated speedier JavaScript engine in the first beta for Firefox 3.1, as well as explore improvements to the Smart Location Bar and a slick interface for hotkey tab switching. Now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux users, the new JavaScript engine, called TraceMonkey, is not turned on by default.

The latest Firefox beta introduces a visual tab switcher and rolls in the Geode geolocator plug-in.

To activate it, type “about:config” into the Smart Bar, then type “javascript.options.jit.content” into the filter. Double-click on the preference listed to change the boolean setting from “false” to “true.” Close the window and you should notice an immediate improvement to the JavaScript rendering speed.

Don’t take my word for it, though. Using the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark test, Firefox 3.1 beta 1 completed the test in 2787.6 milliseconds–about twice as fast as the current stable release, Firefox 3.0.3, which clocked in at 5446.6 ms.

Using CTRL+Tab to jump between open tabs now has graphic overlay, much like the Windows Vista ALT+Tab program switcher. The Geode geolocator plug-in has been rolled into FF3.1. The Geode drop-down worked for me, but it wasn’t always able to find my location.

You can now restrict searches in the Awesome Smart Bar using special characters such as “+” and “#”. These and other aspects of the character restrictions are customizable through about:config.

Two much-anticipated features did not make it into this beta. Private Browsing, Mozilla’s answer to Google Chrome’s Incognito, and enhanced session management features were not available in this beta.

I found that several of my plug-ins were not compatible with the new tab switcher, so I just disabled all of them. Using a plug-in to force forward-compatibility in other plug-ins can lead to instability and crashes, arguably even more so because this is a beta. However, if you’re interested in getting the fastest version of Firefox that we’ve seen to date, Firefox 3.1 beta 1 is going to deliver the goods.

You can read the full list of changes here.

Demand for OpenOffice.org 3 has been so high on its first day of out of beta that the official Web site crashed.

In the meantime, users can also download it for Windows and Mac , and there are a couple of torrents being shared as well on the usual big-name trackers.

OpenOffice’s redesigned landing page.

After using OpenOffice’s MS Word analog, Writer, all day, I can confirm that this update is worth it for the improvement in response and load times, if nothing else. The installation is still enormous, with an installer about 130MB for Windows users and 160MB for Mac, but the installation process is smoother. From start to finish, it clocked in at around 5 minutes, significantly faster than installing OpenOffice 2. People who use OpenOffice as their primary productivity suite should take advantage of the OpenOffice Quickstarter, which noticeably accelerates program launch times and has been made even faster in version 3.

Mac users will also be pleased to see that they no longer need to grab a separate installation of X11–the new installer will run natively on OS X, and Windows Vista users should encounter fewer problems than before.

Many of the new features are only noticeable depending on how much of the OpenOffice suite you use. If you’re a rebel and you use it in your work environment when everybody else is still on Microsoft Office, the compatibility with Office 2007/2008 file formats is hard to ignore. Finally getting native support for DOCX and XLSX, for example, is long overdue. If my tests jumping back and forth between XLSX and XLS files were any indication, though, the formats are now seamlessly integrated. However, OpenOffice can not yet save files in the new MS Office format.

Upgrades to OpenDocument Format 1.2 were glitch-free.

Other improvements to the two most-used programs in OpenOffice include multiple page viewing, improved notes and commenting, and improved PDF creation and importation in Writer, and a Solver feature and spreadsheet sharing in Calc. As you can tell, though, most of these changes bring OpenOffice up to the new standard of MS Office. Besides the OpenDocument Format support, there’s little here that you can’t get in Office. Of course, the benefit of OpenOffice being freeware can’t be understated.

The new Start Center should appeal only to users who like having a landing page or only want to have one link on their desktop. It opens up a slightly redesigned window that highlights all of the OpenOffice tools with big icons. I find the Quickstarter to be a more effective and less intrusive way to do the same thing. Unfortunately, the interface within each program in the suite has gone largely unchanged. It looks fine when compared with MS Office 2003, but not so much when up against the Office 2007/2008.

One useful change involving the landing page is that it now shows up whenever you close a document but don’t exit the program. This streamlines the work flow when jumping between applications, as well as giving you something to look at besides a big gray expanse of nothingness.

Overall, though, the interface isn’t detrimental to using OpenOffice–it’s just not a selling point. If it’s the features that you use the suite for, then there’s no reason not to upgrade.