It’s that time of year again, Max PC readers. It’s time for stuffing ourselves, watching football, and—if "A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving" has taught us anything— it’s time to give thanks. As tech fans, we take a lot for granted, so we felt like taking a step back and examining all the things that are making a nerd’s life better right now.

The New Browser Wars

With IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and now Google’s Chrome all fighting for browser supremacy, it might be hard to remember a time just five years ago when Internet Explorer had the market completely dominated. Sure, Microsoft’s browser might still control a commanding 72% of the market, but competition drives innovation and that other 28% is enough to keep the Redmond giant on its toes.

The Death of Music DRM

For a userbase which has become increasingly used to being treated like criminals, it’s a breath of fresh air that the music industry has largely rejected music DRM in the last year or two. Sure, there are still some holdouts, iTunes most notably, but most other major digital music providers have started offering free-range MP3s, including Wal-mart, Yahoo, Rhapsody and others.

Let’s just hope this wave of good sense continues to take hold in the recording industry.

Open Source/Freeware

Free is always good. Whatever your particular philosophical attachments to the Open Source movement are, you’ll agree that it’s very cool to be able to do more things on your computer without having to pay an extra dime.

Because we like the taste of freedom so much here at Maximum PC, we’ve been dedicating ourselves to showing you how to do all sorts of awesome stuff using free software. Of course, Linux is the king of all freeware, and we think it's so cool that we’ve written several guides just about Ubuntu. And of course, we’ve got plenty more freeware guides on the horizon for 2009.

Spamlords Getting Their Comeuppance

2008 has been a bad year for the spamlords. Well, ok, that might not actually be true; spam is still plentiful, a stunning percentage of internet users are still braindead enough to actually buy things from spam emails, and we’re sure the vast majority of spammers are still making fine money by being total jerkholes. Nonetheless, it’s nice bit of schadenfreude to watch a few of the people responsible for flooding our inboxes with junk get their just deserts.

Gigantic Monitors

With 30-inch displays really hitting their stride and the promise of monitors even more massive looming on the horizon, we’re thankful that our computer time is easier on the eyes than ever before.

On top of that, we’ve recently seen all sort of promising news about how display technology is going to advance over the next couple years. OLEDs are getting cheaper, brighter and more practical, LED backlighting is becoming standard, and multi-touch displays are finally getting to be affordable. The future’s looking brighter than ever.