Month: February 2022

Enlarge / The Mozilla building, Friday, Jan. 19, 2018, in San Francisco, California, Mozilla is the maker of the web browser Firefox. (Photo by Santiago Mejia/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images) (credit: San Francisco Chronicle | Hearst Newspapers | Getty Images)

At the end of 2008, Firefox was flying high. Twenty percent of the 1.5 billion people online were using Mozilla’s browser to navigate the web. In Indonesia, Macedonia, and Slovenia, more than half of everyone going online was using Firefox. “Our market share in the regions above has been growing like crazy,” Ken Kovash, Mozilla’s president at the time, wrote in a blog post. Almost 15 years later, things aren’t so rosy.

Across all devices, the browser has slid to less than 4 percent of the market—on mobile it’s a measly half a percent. “Looking back five years and looking at our market share and our own numbers that we publish, there’s no denying the decline,” says Selena Deckelmann, senior vice president of Firefox. Mozilla’s own statistics show a drop of around 30 million monthly active users from the start of 2019 to the start of 2022. “In the last couple years, what we’ve seen is actually a pretty substantial flattening,” Deckelmann adds.

In the two decades since Firefox launched from the shadows of Netscape, it has been key to shaping the web’s privacy and security, with staff pushing for more openness online and better standards. But its market share decline was accompanied by two rounds of layoffs at Mozilla during 2020. Next year, its lucrative search deal with Google—responsible for the vast majority of its revenue—is set to expire. A spate of privacy-focused browsers now competes on its turf, while new-feature misfires have threatened to alienate its base. All of that has left industry analysts and former employees concerned about Firefox’s future.

Enlarge / A bicycle courier of grocery delivery company “Gorillas” wears a backpack with the logo of the startup on his way to deliver purchases in Berlin. (credit: Tobias Schwarz | Getty)

In May 2021, grocery delivery company Zapp moved into a small garage, squashed between red brick apartment buildings on a residential street called Fagelstraat in Northwest Amsterdam. Many locals had never heard of dark stores, the mini warehouses grocery apps use to dispatch local deliveries. “We didn’t know exactly what they were doing or what type of business it was,” says local resident Alex (not his real name).

In less than a year, that small Fagelstraat garage has become an extreme example of how dark stores can clash with local neighbors. Alex, who has lived on the street for seven years and requested anonymity to avoid further conflict with riders, says there are now 10 to 15 deliveries each day, and giant lorries regularly block the narrow road. “It’s a 24/7 business,” he says, “so riders are coming in and out late at night and early in the morning. At 2 am, I often have people standing in front of my window, smoking and talking really loudly while they are taking a break.” After a month of this, riders and residents started squaring off as tensions boiled over, Alex says. “There’s been a few instances when I almost got into a fight,” he says. “One [rider] was completely in my face. It was pretty frightening.”

In the past year, the spread of dark stores has rapidly accelerated as grocery delivery apps Gorillas, Getir, Flink, and Zapp compete to dominate the Dutch market. As of January, there were 31 dark stores in Amsterdam alone. The Netherlands appeals to these companies because the country is small, densely populated, and flat, meaning it’s easy for their couriers to operate, says Yara Wiemer, an analyst at research and consulting company Kantar. Demand is also soaring. The number of Dutch consumers using grocery delivery apps more than tripled to 700,000 between 2021 and January 2022, according to Wiemer. But as the four apps jostle for dark store space in residential areas so they can offer faster deliveries, complaints about noise, bikes blocking pavements, and increased traffic have become common across the country.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Xinhua News Agency)

A sub-lineage of the omicron coronavirus variant, dubbed BA.2, continues to increase steadily around the globe as scientists and health officials are still working to understand the risk it poses to public health.

So far, the overall data has been a mix. Some recent laboratory and animal data have suggested that BA.2 can cause more severe disease than the original omicron variant, BA.1. But, so far, that finding isn’t bearing out in real-world data. Countries where BA.2 is dominant are not seeing higher rates of severe disease. And, many places seeing BA.2 increasing are also seeing cases decline, along with hospitalizations.

While animal experiments have hinted that BA.2 interacts differently to some immune responses than the original omicron variant, so far real-world vaccine data finds two doses and booster doses are just as effective—if not slightly more effective—against BA.2 than BA.1.

Enlarge / John Cena shows he has some dramatic chops as well as comedic timing in Peacemaker. (credit: HBO Max)

We had our doubts about Peacemaker, the HBO Max spinoff series based on John Cena’s character from 2021’s The Suicide Squad. But I’m happy to report that those doubts were entirely unfounded. Series creator James Gunn has successfully taken a seemingly irredeemable character and sent him on an emotional journey that made us love him—all framed in a blood-soaked, action-packed, cheekily irreverent main story that makes for top-notch entertainment.

(One big spoiler for The Suicide Squad below. Some spoilers for Peacemaker, but no major reveals.)

Gunn wrote the series for fun during his downtime in 2020 and ended up pitching it when DC Films approached him about a spinoff series for one of the characters in The Suicide Squad. HBO Max ordered Peacemaker straight to series. When the first teaser dropped last year, I admitted to being a bit skeptical. Cena’s performance in The Suicide Squad was terrific, but he wasn’t exactly a sympathetic character—or a particularly complex one. On the other hand, Gunn clearly felt there was more of the character’s story to tell, and that instinct proved correct.