Mozilla Labs has announced the winners of the latest Mozilla contest, Extend Firefox 3, which awards the best new and updated extensions for Firefox 3, as well as a the best in the music category, sponsored by Last.fm.

Not surprisingly, among the winners is Pencil, developed by Duong Thanh An, a very capable extension that provides a complete environment for designing user interfaces in easy drag-and-drop fashion.

Another winner is HandyTags, by Remy Szymkowiak, which suggests tags for a web page based on your past used tag, author tags, delicious users’ and those suggested by its own keyword engine, and present them as buttons for one click tagging.

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Mozilla Messaging has reached the second milestone in Thunderbird 3 development (code named Shredder) with the release of Alpha 2.

Among the 264 bug fixes since Alpha 1 (released on May), Alpha 2 can import mail and settings from Mac OS Mail.app, as well as SSL and port settings from Outlook Express configuration on Windows. Faster IMAP delete and undo operations. A polished theme and use of the internal address book by default, provides better Mac OS X integration. An option to include only the selected text on replies should become a valuable time saver, like the new compact (purge) button available in the Customize Toolbar dialog.

Thunderbird 3 is based on the same Mozilla 1.9 platform code base as Firefox 3, so Windows versions previous to Windows 2000 are no longer supported. Tiger (10.4) is the minimum requirement for Mac OS X platforms.

Thunderbird 3 Alpha 2 release notes.

Official Firefox 3 CDs are now available for everyone to buy, own, give or collect, at the Mozilla Store.

Designed by the Royal Order, it features one of the designs of the revamped mozilla.com. Available for $4.20 (US Store) or £3.00 (international store).

On time, as usual, the Mozilla Japan team is ready to start a new month with a new wallpaper featuring Foxkeh. Just one week away from the Olympic Games inauguration, Foxkeh is training on gymnastics.

Get your wallpaper from the Foxkeh blog, available in several resolutions with or without an embedded calendar.

The latest Shiretoko (Firefox 3.1 development codename) nightly comes with an expected and very welcomed feature: support for the HTML5 specification <audio> and <video> tags that will allow web developers to easily (<video src=”myfile.ogg”></video>) add rich content without the need of proprietary plugins.

While the support for the <video> tag is pretty codec-neutral (you can use whatever video format you want provided you have the correct codec), Mozilla’s implementation makes it even easier by bundling Ogg Theora and Vorbis codecs ensuring developers a format to deliver.

However, there is a risk to bundling even an open source codec like Theora because of the possibility of submarine patents -patents nobody knows about until a product that unknowingly infringes it, succeeds, becoming a target for the patent owner who will seek monetary compensation and a good licensing agreement. This is why the HTML 5 spec doesn’t recommend any encoder so vendors don’t have to choose between taking this kind of risk or not complying with the standard.

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During today’s Snowl: Messaging in the browser session, Myk Melez introduced a new Firefox extension called (you guessed!) Snowl, to explore what does it take and whether it makes sense to add messaging capabilities to the browser.

Being an early prototype, Snowl currently only handles Twitter feeds and web feeds you subscribe either manually within Firefox or importing an OPML file.

Then comes another the other experimental aspect of Snowl: presentation. Twitter and web feeds are added to a sidebar (available from the View menu) but instead of folders and items as you may expect, you get a set of predefined searches that return not only the feed titles but also groupings by author name which consolidates all messages you have received from that person.

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Firefox 3.1, codenamed Shiretoko, has reached its first milestone, Alpha 1 pretty much on track for a targeted final release late this year, despite a short delay due to a nasty crash bug with Java on Mac OS X.

Perhaps the most notable improvement with this release is an option to restrict the location bar autocomplete suggestions to either history, tags or bookmarks only as well as an option to tell Firefox to search just for page titles or addresses when looking for a match.

To restrict to history, bookmarks or tags only, enter ^, * or + respectively somewhere between your terms. To include titles or addresses only, you enter # or @, and you can combine them with the previous operators to refine your suggestions.

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Some weeks ago, I was greatly surprised to receive a kind invitation from Mozilla to join the Mozilla Summit 2008, the great all-Mozilla meetup at Whistler, BC. To say I’m thrilled to meet some of the great good guys who make the Mozilla project a reality is an understatement.

But, as usual I’ve waited ’til the very last moment to share this with you (I’m at Philadelphia waiting for my 6 hours connection to Vancouver, after a 4 hours ride from San Juan, Puerto Rico), but hopefully I will be able to share some of the experience of talking about the future of Mozilla and even a release with you all, as Firefox 3.1 alpha 1 is expected to be released tomorrow, driven by Mike Beltzner, directly from Whistler.

So, what do you want to know? If you’ve ever wished to be there at some Mozilla event to learn or ask someting please let me know and I’ll do my best to get it for you.

Mari, Percy, and Cami, I already miss you! :(

The Flock guys have just released a fashion oriented edition of its namesake Firefox-based browser labeled Flock Gloss Edition.

From People to Cosmopolitan to The New York Time’s fashion section, it comes with a thick bundle of fashion, health, and gossip links and feeds framed in a girlish lavender theme to please fashion lovers cravings (well almost).

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Flock has released the second beta of its forthcoming Flock 2, the Firefox-based web browser that features tight integration with most of the most popular social web services including Flickr, Facebook, digg, YouTube and many others.

Flock 2 beta 2 is based on Firefox 3 (3.0.1 actually) code base bringing along all the performance improvements and new features including Places, tagging, malware protection, the new location bar, web content and protocol handlers among others.

Other features include an option to manually update a web feed or group of web feeds and notifications when one is updated.

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