Since the beginning of the internet in the early nineties, browser market share has wildly fluctuated. As an excellent article on the browser wars at evolt.org explains:

In the First Era of browser history Mosaic and the other early browsers ruled. The Second Era was that of Netscape dominance. Microsoft's challenge to Netscape marked the beginning of the Third Era, the Heroic Age of the Browser Wars. Netscape's bleeding to death marked the start of the Fourth Era of Explorer dominance.

We are now officially in the Fifth Era, where Explorer starts to lose its dominance to an Open Source (freely available) competitor, Firefox by the Mozilla Foundation.

Here are some reasons to switch:

- Inbuilt Popup Blocking
- Tabbed Browsing (viewing more than one web page in a single window)
- Privacy and Security (no AcitveX controls, thus much safer than IE)
- Intelligent Search (Google Search is built into the toolbar, and there's a great “find in page” functionality)
- Lots of neat extensions, like local weather and controlling your music center at the bottom of your browser window

At its peak, IE had 93-94% of the market. As of April 2005, there have been more than 40 million Firefox downloads and Explorer's share is eroding fast. Microsoft originally announced that they would not update IE until the next version of Windows, but now they are scrambling to release an IE 7 beta version by this summer.

I live in Palo Alto, which is in the middle of Silicon Valley, about 40 miles south of San Francisco. Just a few miles from my house are Google, Yahoo, eBay, Apple and many other cutting edge technology companies. Plus there is Sandhill Road, also know as Venture Capital Central, and Stanford University, which provides a lot of the raw materials (aka brains) to fuel the innovations in the Valley.

It was exciting living here during the boom years between 1997 and 2001, where everyone was involved in startups and VC's were lining up to fund them. Recently there's been a resurgence in startups around here. My evidence is anecdotal, and includes job listings, conversations and billboards along the 101 Highway.

I came across 3 interesting startups in the past month:

certainly competitive at $1/DVD, could it be the new Netflix?

Peerflix - tagline: Trade DVDs, don't rent them! For $1 you can trade a DVD in your collection for someone else's DVD. The trade is permanent, so no late fees. I don't know if it will work but it makes perfect sense on paper.

gotvmail - allows you to outsource a complete phone answering system. It can forward phone calls to home offices or cell phones, and you can receive voicemail as email attachments. Thanks Nancy for the hat tip. (I would have included their logo but their site is a little Flash heavy, so there were no readily accessible images to grab).

Cellknight

CellKnight - tagline: Track cell phone minutes usage and STOP paying cell phone minutes overage fines
Basically it sends you an alert of how many minutes you have left in your cellphone's monthly plan, so that you can manage it better and avoid going over. You can see it's a real startup from the use of Clipart in the logo.