Mozilla has announced the winners of the previously mentioned extend Firefox contest, with the three grand-prize victors carrying home a beefy PC, along with a considerable amount of developer credibility. Category winners earned some decent prizes as well.

Congratulations to the winners on a job well done.

Having said that, I've tried out the winning extensions, and I have to confess that I'm underwhelmed. Not to take away from their accomplishments, but for a challenge of such magnitude, for a core product with millions of software developer fans, I expected some awe-inspiring, revolutionary products to emerge.

Firefox has an enormously robust and feature rich extension model, where almost anything is possible, yet the roster of available extensions is dominated by trivial tools with simplistic, archaic interfaces, too many of which seem like hack jobs (the exception being the extensions by big corporations -- Corporations that spit and polish their offering to reap the benefits of tracking your habits and encouraging you to use of their search).

Of course I'm complaining about something that is generally free, so as the old saying goes, you get what you pay for...In fact you get far more than you pay for, but it demonstrates that there are limits to the sacrifice and resources someone will commit to a product that they find difficult to monetize.

Not only is it close to impossible to achieve revenue from an extension unless you're pushing a different product (such as search), but the skills and technologies that you learn building extensions is hard to leverage for professional gain (e.g. knowing XUL and the Mozilla extension API is of marginal value outside of building extensions, where the C skills gained doing kernel hacking has tremendous professional value).

Nonetheless, at least the winners weren't gadget clocks. Gadget clocks and basic arithmetic web service examples always strike me as a sign of a technology or platform that is being oversold.