Mozilla just wrapped up its Extend Firefox 3 contest and, after reviewing over 100 entries, its team of judges has announced the winners for Best Add-ons, Best Updated Add-on, and Best Music Add-on. In the Best New Add-on category, the winners were Pencil by Dương Thành An, Tagmarks by Felipe Tassario Gomes, and HandyTag by Rémi Szymkowiak, while the Best Music Add-on category was won by Fire.fm from Jorge Villalobos and Jose Enrique Bolaños.
The contest was meant to showcase extensions that made use of the new capabilities Mozilla introduced in Firefox 3 and managed to combine this with excellent usability and the use of open standards.
Pencil, one of the three Grand Prize winners, is an easy to use tool for GUI prototyping and diagramming, which makes uses of Firefox's SVG support for rendering and scripting. It's obviously not the most exciting of applications, but it works as advertised and is a great tool for anybody who needs to draw up a GUI prototype quickly.
The second Grand Prize winner, Tagmarks, adds a set of icons to your URL bar that allows you to easily add tags to your bookmarks or to quickly bookmark and tag a page at the same time. Out of all the plugins in the contest, this one is probably the most immediately useful. Adding tags to a bookmark can be useful, but few people make use of this capability. Tagmarks also allows you to safe your links to Delicious in addition to your local bookmarks.
The third Grand Prize winner is also a tagging extension: HandyTag. HandyTag suggests tags for your bookmarks based on the tags you have already used, tags given by Delicious users, and tags HandyTag's keyword extractor suggests.
Fire.fm, the best new music add-on, gives you easy access to your stations on our favorite streaming music site, Last.fm. Fire.fm works exactly as advertised and provides a nice way to play music through Last.fm without having to keep a browser window open. You can also easily access your favorite stations by just typing in a few letters into the URL bar.
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The Best Updated Add-on Grand Prize winners are worth mentioning too:
Read It Later - Save pages of interest for later reading
TagSifter - Browse your bookmarks by their tags
Bookmark Previews - Adds an album view and thumbnail view to the bookmarks manager
Posted by: Fasion | August 21, 2008 2:15 PM
Two out of three of the "best new" extensions were for bookmarks? That makes no sense at all. Firefox3 cleaned out all my bookmarks when I upgraded. None. Zippo. Gone. Why would I need to better manage bookmarks that don't exist?
Posted by: Angela Quattrano | August 21, 2008 7:20 PM
This addon didnt make the cut, but its well worth a try!!
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8464
Posted by: Peter Nicholls | August 21, 2008 8:29 PM
I go for Cookiepie: originality, complexity, uniqueness.
Posted by: Diego | August 21, 2008 8:37 PM
I am curious as to why tag suggestions usually run on an opt in framework. I find suggested tags usually pretty good, it would be quicker for me if the tags were there and i could remove the ones i didn't like.
Posted by: Allan | August 21, 2008 8:52 PM
In my opinion Zemanta is the must have extension for FF3, if you happen to create any text content - http://www.zemanta.com/
Posted by: TS | August 22, 2008 12:08 AM
The info about the challenge helped me a lot have to try a hand on it ....thanks for this information
Posted by: busby seo challenge | August 22, 2008 2:55 AM
Somehow it seems to me that the contest heavily encouraged those add-ons that address the issues of lack of functionality in internal features of FF3. It is good to have such plugins for bookmarks management, for example, but does not it hint that the bookmarking functionality in FF is insufficient as it is?
Posted by: Svetlana Gladkova
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August 22, 2008 5:16 AM
Thanks so much for the posting guys!! We really appreciate the support.
Many congrats to the winners of the Extend Firefox 3 contest.
Rey Bango
AMO Community Mobilizer
Mozilla
Posted by: Rey Bango | August 22, 2008 9:33 AM
Good Info!!! We use Firefox here so I will check this out and possibly write something on NewMediaHire.com. Some of the features will be useful.
Posted by: Robin | August 24, 2008 11:01 AM