The New Mozilla Recommended Add-ons List: The Winners and the Losers

In anticipation of the imminent release of Firefox 2.0, Mozilla has relaunched its “recommended add-ons page” this afternoon. (Update: FF 2.0 has officially launched.) The page lost its beta status and gained a picture of a flaming motorcycle (see below). Out goes the old list of 11 recommendations and in comes a new list of 20. The lists are quite different and there are both winners and losers. One company just added to the list told us they saw 2,500 downloads in the first hour after the new add-ons page was quietly made available.

New to the List

Adblock Plus by Wladimir Palant
It’s funny to imagine what many advertisers’ reactions will be when they see this plug-in officially sanctioned by Mozilla. It had to be on the list by popular demand, though, if for no other reason.

blueorganizer by Adaptive Blue
We profiled blueorganizer briefly at DEMO. It’s a smart tool for organizing the information you discover online.

Clipmarks by Clipmarks
An interesting social bookmarking tool with a strong emphasis on sharing and excerpts.

Cooliris Previews by The Cooliris Team
A plug in that provides pop-up previews of Google, image and other search results from inside the search results page. I don’t care for this at all, but I do like the company’s new photo slide show plug-in for Safari.

Download Statusbar by Devon Jensen
A feature rich download manager that sits in a toolbar that hides when not in use.

FoxyTunes by Alex Sirota

A music player control panel that sits in the browser, so you don’t have to switch applications.

Greasemonkey by Aaron Boodman
It’s great that Greasemonkey is included in this list. It’s a whole different paradigm, allowing user-developed JavaScript to be set on top of any web page.

JAJAH by Gilad Katz
We’ve written about Jajah here, it lets you make free and low cost phone calls around the world from inside your browser or by cell phone. Michael Arrington called it a killer VOIP product.

Map+ by Ara Agopian
A very simple tool that launches a Yahoo! Map of any address you highlight on a web page. I use this and like it quite a bit, when I remember to use it.

Pronto by Pronto, Inc.
Alerts you while shopping online if it can find the same product for a lower price on another shopping site.

Other new stars include ChatZilla, an IRC chat plug-in, the web page development tool FireBug, a related project called Web Developer, FireFTP, multi-link downloader FlashGot and weather tool Forecastfox.

Still in the Game

The following ad-ons have survived the purge and remain on the recommended plug-ins list from the beta days of the Mozilla program.

Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer by Foxmarks LLC
Mitch Kapor’s tool to sync Firefox bookmarks across multiple computers you use. Kapor recently wrote that he is working on a new search startup based on the work he’s done with Foxmarks.

Jeteye by Jeteye Technologies, Inc.
Not a bookmark manager, a Jet-pack collection builder. Whatever. I’ve always thought this one was too strange to fly.

LinkedIn Companion for Firefox by Jerry Luk
A plug-in that provides one-click opt out from LinkedIn. Just kidding! Many people like LinkedIn and this lets you have fast access to your contacts.

Performancing by Jed Brown
The Performancing folks made a Firefox plug-in that enables very rich blog posting with ease. Loads of people love it.

Sage by The Sage Team
A side bar RSS reader. If it suits you, fine, but I find a desktop reader much more useful for reading a large number of feeds.

StumbleUpon by Geoff Smith
Another crowd pleaser, StumbleUpon introduces you to random web pages enjoyed by people with interests similar to your own. See our coverage of it here. StumbleUpon was also selected as a recomended plug-in for IE 7 so they are on a roll.

Yoono by Yoono
A TechCrunch sponsor that recommends web pages similar to the ones you are on based on your interests.

Cut From the List

These plug-ins were recommended yesterday - but now they are not. The links are to their extensions on the Firefox site.

Answers
A plug-in that lets you click on any word, push the option key and get info about the word in Answers.com. I use Diigo (our coverage) and get a whole lot more options just as easily. Update: Mike Shaver, who manages the add ons site responded in comments and said that it was only an error that Answers wasn’t included on the list.

del.icio.us
This plug-in makes del.icio.us easy to use inside Firefox and integrates it with the search box. See above, I use Diigo, sync it with del.icio.us and get this and much more.

PayPal Send Money
A plug in that takes you to your PayPal log in page to send some one money. Speaking of my PayPal log in, I think there’s something wrong with mine. Excuse me while I confirm my username and password with this site I just found.

Wizz RSS News Reader

A new version came out just two weeks ago, but it didn’t make the cut.

Congratulations to all the new additions to the list. They are a lucky group that can expect to see a helpful jump in their user numbers.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 24th, 2006 at 2:50 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.