I Just Paid for Something That's Free

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I love Lastpass. It's become a mission critical piece of software for me. I use it several times a day, everyday. It's installed on every machine I have- I even use the bookmarklets on my iPhone. Best of all, it's free.

But not for me. Today I paid for it.

Why would I pay for something I can get for free? It's not the benefits of a premium subscription. Those are rather limited to a couple of enhanced security features I'll never use and an iPhone app that kind of sucks.

No, I decided to cough up the dough because the people at Lastpass have created a kickass product. Not only that, but they continue to crank out cutting-egde features like Google Chrome support, Windows application support, etc. Lastpass has made such a great product, and i rely so heavily on it, that I actually feel guilty NOT paying them for it. It's one of the extraordinarily few products I can honestly say that about.

That's really saying something about their software. What free product/ service would you openly pay for, given the option?

Welcome to Your New Default Web Browser

Chrome

Well that's that. The two extensions which are absolutely critical to my web browsing experience (XMarks + LastPass) are now available for dev builds of Google Chrome. Actually, Chrome's bookmark sync works very well. XMarks is really only required if you absolutely need to keep non-Chrome browser bookmarks in sync. But now I can finally declare Chrome lord and master of my desktop.

Strange thing is, I always thought AdBlock Plus would be the killer extension. (Site note- holy crap. I just launched Firefox so I could look up the proper name for "AdBlock Plus". It took ~20 seconds to launch.) But honestly, I don't mind ads so much. I'm nearly completely desensitized to them now. Things pop up in my sidebar and I don't even see them. After staring at my screen for 10 mins, I still couldn't tell you what the ads said. Speed really does make for a much more pleasant browsing experience.

I've been using the Chrome dev channel builds for about a month, and aside from a crash here and there, the builds are remarkably stable. Firefox is still installed for only 1 reason- Fireshot is a great screenshotting app. But I'm sure it's only a matter of time before that's replaced as well.