We here at Mashable have shared with you a number of feature stories on how to extend your Firefox 3 experience. From must-have add-ons to social applications to gems that’ll help you communicate most effectively with friends, family, co-workers and so forth. Today there comes another set of top-tier add-ons picked from the growing goodie bag in the Firefox marketplace. This time, though, the chosen few have been selected by a group of six judges commissioned by Mozilla as part of a contest it has called Extend Firefox 3, sponsored by ActiveState, Last.fm, and VMWare.
From a pool of over 100 entries, just seven were chosen as grand prize winners in a series of three categories: Best New Add-on; Best Updated Add-on; Best Music Add-on. For both the Best New and Best Updated picks they decided on three first-place finishers each. The extensions left standing are as follows:
BEST NEW ADD-ON
Pencil - GUI prototyping and diagramming, making use of “SVG support in Firefox 3 to implement all the shape rendering and scripting.”
Tagmarks - One-click bookmark tagging.
HandyTag - Automatic bookmark tagging.
BEST UPDATED ADD-ON
Read it Later - Save interesting pages for future reading.
TagSifter - Browse bookmarks by tag.
Bookmark Previews - Adds album and thumbnail views to bookmark manager.
BEST MUSIC ADD-ON
Fire.fm - Access to Last.fm. ‘Nuff said.
Winners of the Best New category receive free travel and accommodation to a Mozilla Developer Day of their choosing, anywhere one might be held. They also net some cool gear and software, too. Winners of the Best Updated category get to stay where they are, but grab a new Macbook Pro. The Fire.fm guys, Jorge Villalobos and Jose Enrique Bolaños, get to travel to Last.fm HQ in London and attend a Last.fm Presents show.
Just so we’re thorough, the judges deemed six runners up in the category of Best New, and we would be remiss not to relay the names. Without further adieu:
Webchunks - implementation of Internet Explorer Webslices, “plus more!”
Badges on Favicons - information badges to those nifty graphics we know and love.
Devo - the band is no more, but this command launcher is very much alive and kicking.
Close ‘n Forget - close tab and forget the visit. For those wild nights in Virtual Vegas, perhaps.
Callout - notification services of the OS for webpages and Greasemonkey scripts.
Reasy - RSVP reader.