Mozilla labs has just released an experimental add-on which let’s you import contacts and email addresses of your friends right inside Firefox. The contacts are listed in a “Contacts” panel and integrate with local and web based address books to concatenate all the contacts at one place. Right now, the add-on works with Gmail, Twitter, Google Apps and personal address books.

To get started, install the contacts add-on ^[1] and restart Firefox. Click “Tools” from the Firefox menu and choose “Contacts”.

^[2]

This will open a new browser tab and you will see options to import your Twitter and Gmail contacts as shown below

^[3] Click the import buttons provided next to a service and all the contacts will be imported in the Firefox contact manager.Once the contacts are listed, you can click on the email links to launch a new compose message with your default email application – Microsoft Outlook, Thunderbird or Gmail.

^[4]

The good thing about the add-on is that you can import contacts from Gmail and Google Apps accounts and can view the email address even if you are offline. If you face problems importing the Twitter contacts, first try saving the username and password of your Twitter account in Firefox.

This add-on looks impressive and will be useful if you find yourself forgetting email addresses of people very often. Note that the native address book import is implemented for Os X only. More information about the add-on can be found on the project page ^[5].