Developers have neglected personal contact management in recent years. Microsoft Outlook still dominates, Google has never had a serious offering.
Now Mozilla has entered the fray with Contacts, a Firefox contact management plug-in.
It’s still at version 0.1, not even a beta at this stage. Which means Contacts is clunky and could cause crashes or other problems. Mozilla recommends you don’t use it with your normal Firefox profile.
The still-unfinished software promises to pull all your contacts together from a variety of sources. There are importers for:
- Gmail
- Gravatar Avatar Images and
- Native address book (on your computer)
The first three worked on my system. The Gmail importer works when you log into Google . The Twitter importer needs a Twitter password stored in your Firefox password list. The first two work almost instantly, the Gravatar importer takes a few minutes.
At this stage, the contact list isn’t much better than Gmail’s and I found many duplicates and unidentified contacts in my list.
Eventually, Mozilla contacts will allow you to auto-complete names and email addresses when filling on web forms.
For now, it has limited functionality, but there’s potential here. I’m particularly impressed with the data portability – keeping one set of contacts on my desktop and laptop.