The IE Blog announced the IE Add-ons Contest Winners a couple of days, and I have to take a moment to bitch about this, even though the first few comments on the site echo my thoughts.

First thing is that the first criteria is:

Creativity: Creative and innovative application.

Fair enough. I applaud Microsoft for engaging the community, encouraging innovation and doing something different. However, lets take a look at the winning entries:

Grand Prize - Inline Search

Available in firefox since sometime at least in the 1.x series.

First - Spell checking

Available in Firefox version 2.0, released mid to late 2006.

Second - FoxyTunes (puts media player buttons in your browser)

Available as a plugin for firefox since 2004.

So basically the first three prizes, equaling a trip and $3k cash were won by re-creating features available on a competing browser. Huh?

Do the authors of the plugins deserve credit for the work they did? Yes. Are these features needed in IE7? Definately! That's why they were created no doubt. Do they deserve to win the top three prizes in a contest where innovation is the first criteria? Uhmm.... I don't know about that. Oh, and some of the winning plugins (not those top three though) are for pay as well (but I guess that follows the Microsoft philosophy).

Just when I just think that I am understanding Microsoft, they confuse me again.

Anyone else have any thoughts / opinions on this? Am I mindlessly bitching here?

Posted by Arcterex at March 20, 2007 02:55 PM