Online registration began June 16 and entries are accepted until October 2, 2009. The winners should be announced mid-November. The top winner category is "Best New Add-On" for as yet unreleased enhancements to Firefox 3.5, with three winners and six runners-up.

Three additional categories are for already released innovations. "Best Updated Add-On" will have three winners and "Best Shoping Add-On" and "Best Game & Entertainment Add-On" will have one each. Prizes are already announced for each category: MacBook versions, developer program licenses and books.

The contest jurors were recruited from the diverse Mozilla community, among them the creator of the JQuery library, John Resig. Their selection of winners will be based on user experience and innovativeness (50%), platform leverage and use of new capabilities introduced in Firefox 3.5 (25%), technical correctness (15%), and use of open source license and open standards (10%). Firefox 3.5 for developers is currently in its fourth beta.

An open source license is not necessary for entries, but organizers and sponsors want to retain reproduction rights. The full text of the official rules are on the contest website. The winner of last year's contest was the Pencil GUI prototyping and diagramming Firefox add-on.