Apologies for the Rocketboom obsession but it's become my online soap opera. Anyway, it's supposed to come back to life in an hour but it can't be a good sign when you hit the site, and get a "Site Temporarily Unavailable" message.
Update: No sign yet of anything, although there is a new message that says "rocketboom 2.0...coming soon"
Update II: So, it doesn't look like Rocketboom is coming back today. There a short video of a blank set until what appears to be a baseball catcher abruptly slides through the screen. There's also a message from Andrew Baron: "Rocketboom was obviously very dependent on Amanda's role. Since she left so suddently, I have tried to get the episodes up and running as soon as possible, though I am not comfortable with the way they are going yet."
  I think Andrew needs to embrace the adage: "underpromise and over-deliver" because the more he establishes re-launch times that don't happen, the more disappointed people will become. Unless Andrew comes up with a stroke of brilliance, I'm not convinced it can find its groove again. My advice would be for Andrew to beg, plead and/or bribe Amanda to come back, and let her do the show from L.A. It would make for great PR and resuscitate  the potential of their investment. If you haven't seen it yet, here's a video of Baron explaining what happened last week.

While Firefox doesn't seem as sexy these days (maybe it's a good sign), it now 15.8% of the U.S. browser market. Globally, Firefox has 12.93%, compared with 11.79% in May, according to OneStat.com. IE's market share fell to 83.05%, although it has fallen to 79.8% in the U.S. The most enthusiastic Firefox users are in Germany where the browser has 39% of the market. While I've been an ardent Firefox user for the past year or so, I recently started using the new version of Flock after finding its first foray to be less than ideal. One of the reasons Flock now has some appeal is how you can customize with extensions - just like Firefox. Flock became my 1A browser after someone came out with a hack so password tool Roboform will work with it. (Roboform, in my view, is the Web 2.0 because its easy to ramble all over the Web without having to punch in passwords at each site).
   While I don't expect IE to lose its perch at the top (maybe IE7 will revive its market share) but choice is always a good thing because it encourages innovative. Speaking of choice, The Economist recently had a story looking at whether there were alternatives to Google. Part of Google's "problem" is its dominance, which probably keeps new, small  players with interesting features/ideas out of the search game. It is pretty amazing that Google has dominated the search market for the past four, five years. In the high-tech world, this is an eternity. Anyone using new and interesting search engines? Update: The first beta of Firefox 2.0 (download here) is slated to come out July 11 (today). If you're brave and bold, go for it. For the rest of us who want to make sure all of our extensions still work, hang on.