The challenge to Mozilla is the same as the challenge to all open-source companies and organizations who have found success in the recent year: how to market against the big dogs. Mozilla has proven it can write great software. Now can it market great software? To do so required money, discipline, and an unjaundiced eye to the rigors of success in a capitalistic society.

Yet there remains an enormous potential for increased technological development as well. Popular SYS-CON editor Sean Rhody (pictured) recently expressed is frustration with the state-of-the-art in his article, "Death to the Browser," in which he says that browsers today are "brain dead" and that future generations of this key software should at least offer basic benefits such as bi-directionality and extensible controls.

Baker points out that the Mozilla community is a worldwide network of open source software contributors, including developers, beta testers, designers, writers and end users. In this spirit, Mozilla has announced the Extend Firefox Contest to encourage development of extensions to the award-winning Firefox Web browser. Extensions can be anything from a toolbar button to a completely new feature, Mozilla says in its official announcement, and the contest is expected to generate hundreds of new extensions for Firefox, allowing people to further personalize their Web browsing experience and to make surfing the Web even more fun and convenient.

Developers can tap into the Mozilla Developer Center (MDC), which will be hosting the contest, to find resources and pointers to help create extensions for Firefox. The contest also coincides with the launch of Firefox 1.5 – expected later this year – and developers are encouraged to take advantage of Firefox 1.5's new features.

"We're eager to see what our developer community has in store for Firefox users with this call for the next wave of extensions," said Beard. "We, and most importantly, our users, have been very pleased with the extensions that have been developed over the last year – the breadth and depth of the Firefox Extensions currently available is a testament to the strength of Firefox as a platform for innovation."