I don't usually tout the value of one product over another, but at present the Firefox web browser has a few advantages which make it the best tool out there in terms of helping students write and research online. Most of these come from the fact that Firefox is open source and communities of programmers have written extensions and add-ons to the Firefox you can download. Here are two of my favorites:
Ubiquity
Ubiquity is still in the early experimental stage, but I suspect it will change how many of us interact and use the web. Why? Because Ubiquity helps your browser and online services like dictionaries, gmail, and Wikipedia understand the concept of "this." Install Ubiquity--it's free, and in Windows hit "Ctrl space" to call it up. Say you are reading an online assignment, and you don't recognize a word. Highlight the word; hit "ctrl space," and type in "define this." Ubiquity will go out to several online dictionaries and show you the meaning, pronunciation, etc. Say you are reading Dr. King's "Letter from the Birmingham Jail," and you come upon the tidbit that King was associated with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. You want to know what wikipedia has to say about the organization. You highlight the name; hit "ctrl space," and type "Wikipedia this." Since everyone on campus is now connected with gmail, you can even use Ubiquity to email a highlighted section of a web page to a contact. The command you would type in would be "gmail this to contact." You get the idea, Ubiquity helps you access online resources on the web page where you are at.
zotero
Zotero bills itself as a "free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources." It was developed at Virginia's own George Mason University under a grant for the Mellon Foundation, and the grant was aimed at making doing small or complex online research more efficient. Using the program, you can save entire web pages or sections of them. Pull down online academic articles, pdfs, images, etc. Annotate what you save, and Zotero will keep track of your notes and the citation information for everything you pull down; moreover, it will produce citations for the information you save in multiple styles, and it will export this information to Word and OpenOffice documents. Finally, Zotero is quickly becoming a default standard for managing online research, as it has been adopted and taught to students by hundreds of institutions and universities--from MIT, Standford, and Berkeley to UVA and Salt Lake Community College. These colleges even how online web tutorials on how to use zotero
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