We received tons of entries, the standard, and variety of which was incredibly high. After an intense deliberation among the add-on team, we have picked the following ten add-ons for inclusion in the Firefox 4 collection:

• Tab Scope: Tab Scope lets you preview your open tabs with a thumbnail image just by hovering over them
• Apture Highlights: Highlight a word or phrase, and Apture Highlights will search the web and provide information all without having to leave the page.
• Thumbnail Zoom: Shows a full size image when you hover over thumbnails on popular websites like Facebook, Twitter or Picassa.
• QuickFox Notes: Take notes when you’re browsing the web, and store them for easy access later.
• FoxySpider: Crawls the website you’re browsing for you, and displays video clips, images and other files in an easy to use thumbnail gallery.
• KwiClick: highlight text to get search results, maps, videos and more – within the page you’re browsing.
• Awesome Screenshot: Screen-capture the whole page or a selection, then annotate with comments or drawings and upload to share.
• Drag & DropZones: Assign search engine queries or actions to ‘drop-zones’ that appear when you drag text, images or links.
• Mouse Control: Navigate tabs even faster with mouse click combinations from anywhere in a tab.
• Instantfox: search the web using your address bar, with short cuts for search engines and other popular websites, like Amazon, Wikipedia or YouTube.

Look out for these in the new Add-on manager, Rock Your Firefox, Facebook, and other channels over the coming months. If you didn’t win, don’t worry; there’ll be plenty of further opportunities this year to get your add-ons promoted, so keep up the good work!

Firefox 4 Beta is now API frozen, so if you haven’t already done so, please make sure your add-on is compatible. Firefox 4 is a significant upgrade that may require a little more work to be done to make sure your add-on works than in previous Firefox releases.

Jorge Villalobos has outlined the changes to Firefox 4 that may affect add-on compatibility. If you have any further questions, or concerns, or know of any breaking changes that are not listed, please post in this forum thread, or join #extdev on irc.mozilla.org for real-time assistance.

Don’t forget, Firefox 4 Beta for mobile is available in the Android Market and preparing for final release. Learn more about how to make your add-on mobile compatible.

Firefox 4 Add-on collection competition

To celebrate Firefox 4′s arrival, we are launching a new add-on collection, which will showcase some of the best add-ons for Firefox 4. The collection will be promoted for two months after Firefox 4 is launched, through the Add-on Manager, our Add-ons Gallery, Facebook, the Rock Your Firefox blog, and through Twitter, among other channels.

To have a chance of being featured in the Firefox 4 add-on collection, once your add-on is ready – email us at fx4-compatibility@mozilla.com with “Add-on competition” in the subject line, a link to your add-on, your name, and a brief description of your add-on’s functionality. The winning 10 add-ons, as chosen by the Mozilla Add-ons team, will be promoted from the Firefox 4 launch day.

Get your entries in by March 6th 2011. If you win, we’ll reach out to you to let you know shortly before the launch of Firefox 4. Download the contest rules here.

A video tour of the new features

Mark your favorites and get back to them quickly

Most people use collections to keep track of their favorite add-ons, so we’ve made it one click to favorite an add-on from almost anywhere on the site. You’ll automatically have a private My Favorite Add-ons collection where all of your favorites will be stored.

Instantly add to your existing collections or create new ones

Placing an add-on in any other collection is as easy as favoriting: just click the Add to Collection icon and select its destination. If you want to start a new collection for it, you can do that from anywhere now too!

Easily follow, share, and manage collections

Similarly to add-on listings, it’s now possible to follow, share, and edit collections from anywhere you see them listed in the Collections Directory. We’ve also made the directory navigation easier to understand.

Better collection permissions and URLs

With more than 64,000 collections created in the last 14 months, it can be difficult to find a unique URL for a new collection that isn’t already in use. We’ve changed the URL structure so that all of your collections are under your username and can be called anything you want. Existing owners of collections may want to read our Migration FAQ.

We hope you enjoy these new features and are working hard on many other improvements over the coming months. If you haven’t explored collections yet, now’s a great time.

Visit the Collections Directory

That means it’s easy to subscribe to collections, manage your collections, share add-ons with friends, and automatically sync add-ons using an auto-publisher from within Thunderbird and SeaMonkey.

Today’s release also adds prototype support for syncing the add-ons in a collection with Firefox on your mobile device. Just create a collection with your favorite mobile add-ons, install the Add-on Collector on mobile, choose your collection, and hit Sync.

You can grab the latest version of the Add-on Collector from Mozilla Add-ons.

A full list of bugs fixed in this release is available here. A huge thanks goes to Brian King and David McNamara for their work on this release.

The first week of collections blew away our goals for the launch, so I’d like to share some statistics from the last week. Add-on users have created more than 11,000 collections, comprising 140,000 instances of 3500 different add-ons. Of those collections, 6200 are listed publicly in the Collection Directory, while the others are private. We’ve served over 245,000 add-on downloads from collection view pages, not including downloads served from other pages accessed through collections.

The Add-on Collector has been very successful as well, with 46,000 downloads and about 19,000 Collectors in use. Users of the extension have created 2500 auto-publisher collections, which are collections automatically kept in sync with the add-ons that user has installed in Firefox. And hundreds of add-ons have been shared with friends through the Collector’s email sharing feature.

But the most rewarding measure of success so far has been hearing people say collections have helped them discover new add-ons, which was the primary goal of the project.

Because the response to collections has been so great, we’re going to keep adding new collections-related features and improvements over the next few months. We have a number of ideas for what features to implement, but need help from the community to identify which cool new collection features are most wanted. So, if you’re interested in the future of collections, head over to the newsgroup and let us know which of the proposed features you want to see.

In November, we launched Fashion Your Firefox, which was a collection of add-ons that we felt were great for a novice user just getting started with customizing their browser. Now, we’d like to take it a step further and let anyone create their own collection of add-ons that can be shared with their friends, posted on blogs, and featured on the Firefox Add-ons website.

Just as a DJ selects which songs to play and comment on, we want to let anyone create a list of add-ons on any topic — whether it’s “Justin’s Must-have Firefox Extensions”, “David’s Favorite Travel Add-ons”, or “Nicole’s St. Patrick’s Day Themes”. These user-created collections would appear in a directory alongside collections created by Mozilla. We’re interested in what sorts of collections people would create, and what collections you’d like to see in the directory. Please share your ideas with us in the comments.

We’re very excited about this idea and hope that it will improve add-on discovery, increase user involvement with add-ons, improve the stickiness of the add-ons website, and make add-ons more social. If you’re interested in learning more about the project, you can visit our project wiki.

For those of you who like to read ahead, here are the slides:

You’ll also be able to ask questions in #airmozilla on irc.mozilla.org, or via the air.mozilla.com website.

Hope to see you there!

Nick

The “Fashion Your Firefox” web application was developed to help the less tech-savvy user wade through the thousands of Firefox add-ons available. These add-ons, many of which are on the AMO Recommended List, were chosen explicitly for their consumer-centric uniqueness and appeal to a broader audience. FYF allows a user to focus on a small group of really useful add-ons and easily install these add-ons via an intuitive point-and-click interface.

David Rolnitzky, lead for the Fashion Your Firefox project, had this to say:

One of the great things about the Fashion Your Firefox collection is that it allows users to bundle a bunch of different add-ons together all at once. In essence, it’s like having a shopping cart that you can use to select any add-on from the Fashion Your Fox collection, “check-out” with just one click, and after a quick Firefox restart, have a whole new browser that’s made just for you.

The add-ons for this first collection were chosen based on a number of criteria:

• Consumer friendly
• Represent a variety of categories and functionality
• Good user experience
• Good traction with users
• Firefox 3 and Mac/PC compatible

The launch of “Fashion Your Firefox” offers some interesting opportunities to Mozilla, its users and its development partners.

Benefits for Mozilla:

• We now have an easier method to distribute add-ons in a format that is intuitive, especially to mainstream users
• FYF gives users an additional method of discovering add-ons
• It opens up yet another method of giving add-on developers an opportunity to spotlight their work

Benefits to the community/add-on authors:

• FYF is another opportunity for distribution in addition to lists/categorization on AMO
• FYF will offer broad exposure to a different set of users

The really interesting part of the “Fashion Your Firefox” web application is the opportunity it presents to provide “theme-based” collections of add-ons to users. Add-ons can now be grouped into specific topics such as sports, news, photography and music giving Mozilla users a very rich and precise experience when searching for “just the right add-on”. This a HUGE distinction for Firefox in terms of the way that browsers have typically handled add-on management and a clear step forward in helping introduce users to the power of add-ons without completely overwhelming them. By enhancing the delivery model, we’re now providing users with the ability to quickly choose from “best of breed” add-ons that match their specific tastes, all of which falls perfectly in line with Mozilla’s focus of empowering the community.