While Microsoft is busy fighting the search engine war, it might be losing ground on another front: Use of Microsoft’s internet Explorer has dropped below the 60% mark, dropping from 62.09 % to 59.49 % in June.  It seems like some who jumped the Microsoft ship are switching to Firefox- the free, open-source, downloadable browser that launched version 3.5 weeks ago.  As Internet Explorer’s market share dropped, Firefox’s increased: from 28.75% to 30.33%.  One of the appealing features of Firefox is the add-ons, or plug-ins, that work with the browser.  Here are some top picks:

Brief: A tool for RSS feeds that makes following your favorite sites, bloggers, and news items as easy and uncluttered as possible.  Feeds are presented on a single page, where you can easily tag, bookmark, and modify the appearance of specific feeds- for example, headlines only.

Read It Later: Have you ever come across a page or article that didn’t quite warrant a bookmark, but that you didn’t have time to read immediately?  Enter Read It Later, a tool that allows you to save pages temporarily for later review.  You can read saved pages online and access your saved list from any mobile device.

Googlepedia: Automatically adds a Wikipedia search to to all of your google searches. Great for when you want to know what something is (a manufacturing process, a company, a brand name) rather than sort through blogs or sites that just talk about it.

Search Cloudlet: Displays the most used search words in a “cloud” on top of your google searches, giving you hints about what to search for next if a particular query doesn’t return the results you want.

TwitterFox: Adds a Twitter icon to your status bar that lets you “tweet,” plus keeps you up-to-date on friend’s Twitter status easily.

Tab Mix Plus: The ultimate tab manager, this tool lets you control which links open in tabs and windows down to the most personalized detail- you can easily keep track of which tabs you haven’t viewed, undo “close tab” in case you accidentally lose information, and much, much more.

XMarks: According to Firefox, it’s the #1 bookmarking add-on.  Xmarks allows you to keep bookmarks and passwords synchronized across all browsers, computers, and devices you use, as well as offering a host of search and social-media friendly features.

DownloadThemAll: A must for anyone who downloads big files or multiple files at once.  DownThemAll is the ultimate high-powered download manager, featuring download acceleration (up to 400 percent!) and the option to pause/resume downloads, among other features.

Download Status Bar: If you don’t need as much download power as DownloadThemAll provides, Download Status Bar is great- it allows you to see download status in your status bar, rather than a separate window.

SmarterFox: What business owner or entrepreneur doesn’t wish they had more hours in each day?  SmarterFox can’t suspend time, but it comes close in terms of adding minutes to your day.  This tool makes everything you do online faster- searching, copy-and-pasting, and bookmarking favorite sites, all take up less time than they would using a traditional browser without the add-on.

Speed Dial: Speed Dial works the same as on a telephone -you can quickly and easily access the websites you visit most often.

New Firefox add-ons are constantly being developed (you can check the add-ons tab on your toolbar for the most recent updates to yours), and this is by no means an inclusive list.  Feel free to remind us of any add-ons you’re using.