Mozilla names best Firefox 3 add-ons

Crowns 7 winners in annual developer contest

By Gregg Keizer
Mozilla Corp. today announced the winners of its third "Extend Firefox" contest, an annual competition that recognizes the year's best Firefox add-ons.

This year's contest, which launched in March and brought in more than 100 entries, focused on add-ons that took advantage of Mozilla's newest open-source browser, Firefox 3.0.

Mozilla unveiled the final version of Firefox 3.0 in June after a long series of alpha, beta and release candidate versions.

The company awarded three grand prizes in the "Best New Add-on" category to Pencil, a diagramming and graphics interface tool; Tagmarks, which adds additional tagging icons to Firefox 3.0's location bar; and HandyTag, an extension that provides relevant keywords for associating with bookmarked sites.

In the "Best Updated Add-on" category, Mozilla also pegged three winners, including Read it Later, a bookmarking substitute; TagSifter, which lets users browse bookmarks by their tags; and Bookmark Previews, an extension that adds album and thumbnail views of bookmarked sites.

It's not surprising that many of the contest winners add functionality to Firefox's bookmarking; Mozilla revamped the tool by adding an integrated search engine, single-click bookmarking and other features.

Mozilla also singled out Fire.fm in the "Best Music Add-on" category. The extension lets users access the music library on Last.fm, the U.K.-based Internet radio Web site.

The winners in the new add-on group will be given travel and accommodations to the Mozilla Developer Day of their choice, as well as new Apple Inc. MacBook Air notebooks. The three developers awarded prizes in the updated add-on category will receive a 15-in. MacBook Pro notebook, while the author of Fire.fm will be flown to London to visit the headquarters of Last.fm.

The contest also recognized six runner-ups in the new add-on category.