Windows: Have some windows you might need to stash in a hurry? Don't want your boss to catch you goofing off? Everyone needs a break now and then and Don't Panic! will help you keep your breaks discreet.

While most 'boss-key' applications limit themselves to simply hiding specified applications at a keystroke, Don't Panic! strives to avoid being a one-trick pony by offering a wide variety of options for you to toggle.

You can activate Don't Panic! by either keyboard shortcut or, as seen in the screenshot here, by hitting the Don't Panic! button in the lower right corner of your monitor. You can adjust the transparency of the button or disable all together and stick to the keyboard shortcut.

Don't Panic! can simply hide the windows you have specified, even hiding the application from the Task Manager, or it can close the application either by terminating the process or closing it properly. You can also have Don't Panic! delete all the shortcuts in the recent files folder, dump your Internet Explorer history and temporary files, and purge the Recycle Bin.

One thing to keep in mind when using an application like Don't Panic! is that all of its powers are limited to changing things at the workstation you are sitting at. If your company, for example, enforces internet usage policies by monitoring the traffic coming from your terminal, Don't Panic! won't do anything to stop The Man from putting the brakes on your cubicle party.

Don't Panic! is open source, Windows only.

Opera Mini, which is probably the best browser for BlackBerry and other Java enabled mobile phones, just got better.

Opera today released a new version of Opera Mini that includes tabs so you can open multiple web pages in the same browser simultaneously without having to close the previous ones.

Other new features in Opera Mini 5 that lot of you may find useful are copy-paste and a built-in password manager so you don’t have to type your logins and passwords over and over again.

Screenshots of Opera Mini 5

Opera Mini 5 is still in beta but the good part is that you can install it alongside your existing installation of Opera Mini 4. To download Opera Mini 5, visit m.opera.com/next from your mobile phone browser and download the Opera Mini 5 installer specific to your phone.

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Windows only: Chrome turned one year old just a couple weeks back, and as a belated celebration, the folks at Google have just pushed out a brand new stable release in the form of Google Chrome 3.

Chrome 2 (stable) hit servers back in May, and while the folks at Google are currently on Chrome 4 in the dev channel, those of you who haven't been eager to play on the bleeding edge of Chrome releases have a lot of nice improvements in store for them in Chrome 3, including:

• Speed Improvements: Chrome 3 is faster than any previous stable release on both the V8 and SunSpider benchmarks. (Google's calling it a 150% increase in Javascript performance since their first beta.) In the current Chrome 4 dev release, Chrome continues to outshine other browsers on most speed benchmarks.
• The New Tab Page: Again, this is only new to those of you who've been sticking to stable releases, but the new tab page is more customizable, allowing you to rearrange thumbnails via drag and drop and pin thumbnails you want to keep around permanently.
• Better Omnibox: Firefox has its awesome bar, Chrome has its omnibox. As of the stable Chrome 3 release, the omnibox adds contextual icons to help you see whether autocomplete results are suggest sites, searches, bookmarks, or sites from your history.
• HTML5: Google has been pushing the envelope with what developers can do with HTML5, the new standard set of tools in the next evolution of HTML (the backbone of web pages). In Chrome 3 stable, HTML5 is standard—meaning support for video, audio, and canvas tags that bring a rich web experience to your browser without the need for third-party plug-ins like Flash.
• Themes: We've highlighted a handful of the great new Google Chrome themes already, but now they're available to the stable channel users, as well.

Of course, none of this is all that exciting if you've been using the beta or dev channels for your Chrome updates, but if your workplace, for example, won't let you use anything but stable releases of software, the stable Chrome update is very welcome. Chrome 3 stable is a free download, Windows only.

(Note: Google continues its rather speedy version number jumping here—having dropped three "major" releases in just over a year. It may seem a little silly that it's now on the same version number as Firefox and looks like it'll easily beat Firefox to 4.0, but keep in mind that version numbers are largely arbitrary, so while Google may well hit Chrome 10 in another year or two, it has little bearing on how it compares to other browsers.)