Extend Firefox Winners Announced
by Joe Brockmeier - Dec. 01, 2009Comments (3)- Related Blog Posts
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The Mozilla Project has announced the winners of the Extend Firefox contest. The contest required entries to make use of new features in the Firefox 3.5 series, and included categories for best new add-on, best updated add-on, best shopping add-on, and best game & entertainment add-on.
The winning entries for Best New Add-on were FireFound by Chris Finke, Multifox by Jeferson Hultmann, and Voyage by Hsiao-Ting Yu. FireFound sends your machine's location to a secure server, with the idea that if your machine is stolen, it can send its location using Firefox's Geolocation API to help track the machine. This assumes the thief uses Firefox after stealing the machine, of course. It works with Firefox and mobile Firefox.
The Multifox extension is a dream come true if you have to manage multiple profiles on one or more Websites. Instead of having to log in and out of a site, Multifox allows you to use multiple log-ins in a single session. Especially handy for working with social media sites like Twitter if you have a personal account and manage a work account as well.
Want a visual history of your browsing session? Voyage gives you a visual display of your browsing history and integrates with Twitter so you can see how your browsing habits sync up with your tweets.
The updated category also has three grand-prize winners. Smart Find by Antonio Gomes, Book Burro by Jesse Andrews, and Speed Dial by Josep Del Rio. If your spelling could use improvment, check out Smart Find. It makes it possible to find words on a page even when you don't know the exact spelling. It matches words phonetically, so you still need to know how to pronounce the word.
Bibliophiles will rejoice at Book Burro, online retailers maybe not so much. It searches multiple sites to find the best price on books, and searches libraries so you may be able to get your reading fix without having to part with any cash at all.
Speed Dial emulates the Speed Dial function found in Opera, so Firefox users can create a set of favorite sites and access them through a handy "speed dial" interface of thumbnails. It's surprising that Firefox hasn't incorporated this as a standard feature just yet, but users who like the speed dial approach can get their fix without having to abandon the Firefox ship.
The Best Shopping category was picked up by the presumably pseudonymed Captain Caveman. Caveman's submission is a Grocery List Generator that allows you to choose from a database of recipes and generates a shopping list for you. No more forgetting the key ingredients when putting together a list of dinners for the week and having to make a second trip to the store for the parsnips.
Best Game comes from Jose Enrique Bolaños allows you to turn a standard Webpage into an arcade game. Stressed out by Bugzilla? Blow it up!
Prizes for the contest are nothing to sneeze at. The winner of the Best New Add-On picks up a 15" MacBook Pro, Firefox Ogio backpack, a ton of books from Manning Publications and InformIt, and licenses for TextMate IDE, ExpandDrive, and Versions SVN client. Winners of the other categories pick up similar prize packages with a 13" MacBook Pro.
Get a full list of winners and runners-up on the winners page. If you're looking for new and interesting Firefox extensions, you'll find quite a few useful add-ons there.
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier is a longtime FOSS advocate, and currently works for Novell as the community manager for openSUSE. Prior to joining Novell, Brockmeier worked as a technology journalist covering the open source beat for a number of publications, including Linux Magazine, Linux Weekly News, Linux.com, UnixReview.com, IBM developerWorks, and many others.
