The Best Firefox Extensions: How Useful Are They?

Firefox team has announced the winners in the Extend Firefox 3 contest for Firefox extensions and add-ons. Let’s take a look at the winners and see what the experts recruited think are the tools we are supposed to benefit the most of using with our dearest Firefox browsers.

Over 100 various extensions have been submitted by the developers since the contest was launched in March. 3 add-ons were named winners in the best new add-on category with 6 more runners-up. Additionally 3 best updated add-ons have been chosen and the best music addon as well (one only). The developers of the best add-ons will be rewarded with prizes, including MacBook Air and Macbook Pro laptops and trips to the Mozilla Developer Day of their choice.

Here are the allegedly best Firefox add-ons along with the brief descriptions of what you should expect them to do after installation. First the best new add-ons:

Pencil

Pencil allows everyone to create graphic interfaces and diagrams right within Firefox.

Tagmarks

This one is intended to help you better organize and access your bookmarks in Firefox. It adds a number of icons and associates these icons with the tags that you use for the bookmarked pages. So when you need to access some of the bookmarked pages marked with a certain tag you will simply need to click the icon associated with this particular tag.

HandyTag

This is another tool to help you manage Firefox bookmarks. HandyTag retrieves relevant keywords from various sources (including your own existing tags, meta-tags of the bookmarked pages, delicious tags for these bookmarked pages) and allows a user to apply them to bookmarks as tags.

The winners in the best updated add-ons category are:

Read It Later

This one is quite a popular add-on already that allows users to save certain pages to read later (online or offline) separately from your main bookmarks that you actually want to keep forever.

TagSifter

Another add-on dealing with tags for your bookmarks. This one allows you to easier browse your bookmarks based on tags. TagSifter must have received the prize because it addresses an important problem of Firefox shifting to tag-based bookmarking from the traditional folders without providing tools to tag your existing bookmarks. And since TagSifter actually provides functionality to do just that, it must be very useful for all the users that want all their bookmarks (including those created before the upgrade to version 3) properly tagged.

Bookmark Previews

This add-on does exactly what it promises to do in the name: adds previews for your bookmarks and offers both an album view and thumbnail view for the bookmarks in the Library.

And the best music add-on is Fire.fm, a tool for quick direct access to Last.fm music library and functionality.

And while I don’t see any of my favorite add-ons in the list of winners (and I tend to believe I am not the only one like that) Gina Trapani (who was on the panel of judges for this year’s contest) explains that “this is the Extend Firefox 3 contest. Therefore, you’ll notice the winners’ entries primarily involve new Firefox 3-specific features, like bookmark tags and web page preview capabilities.”

So it looks very much to me that Firefox team has very much encouraged those add-ons that deal with the new features of Firefox that seem to lack in functionality as they are. I believe now that they are announced to be the best Firefox add-ons, they will dramatically increase the number of installs they get but unfortunately I don’t see them becoming actually the most useful Firefox tools for the end user.