I am in Switzerland for Christmas. I launch a new Firefox install. Firefox loads the Firefox Start page, featuring Google search. The page is in German.

About 64% of people speak Swiss-German dialects (and German as well), 20% French, 7% Italian, based on geographical boundaries. People in these different areas do not necessarily have a working knowledge of the other languages (even though they should). This means that Switzerland is not a German-speaking country in the same way that Germany is.

For this reason, it is not ok to present pages in German by default when you believe that the user is located in Switzerland. Even if you think it is ok to make an clearly erroneous guess, then you must provide an easy way to switch to the other national languages as well as English. This ability must be available directly on the home page and must be a one-click operation. This is how Swiss sites typically behave.

The Firefox home page is particularly badly designed in this respect. You can't switch language directly on the page. In fact, to change the language, you have to know German to go to the advanced search preferences ("Einstellungen", and then find the menu to change the user's language), which does not make any sense. Somebody without a knowledge of basic German or an awful lot of patience will simply not be able to do it at all.

Other countries are multi-lingual, including but not limited to Belgium and Canada. I think it is time that companies that design localized sites become aware of this issue.

At long last, Firefox 3 is coming, with a second beta released just a few days ago.

Firefox 2 is not too bad, and it is certainly preferable to using Internet Explorer, but it is plagued by memory leaks and gradual performance slowdowns. Firefox 3 is meant to improve a lot on this, thanks to "nearly 2 million lines of code changes" in the new Gecko engine.

Add to this the fact that Firefox 3 greatly improves Mac OS X support (Firefox 2 on Mac OS X is sub-par compared to its Windows incarnation, with no native widgets and funny UI bugs), and there is no doubt that it will be a necessary upgrade.

My first impression of 3.0 beta 2 is very good: history back/forward is much snappier, as is switching between tabs. Google Reader seems much faster. I have been using the beta for several days without any major problems, except some oddities in the Download Manager, and missing file names when printing to PDF.

Compatibility with web sites out there seems excellent, although it is inevitable that issues will arise here or there. In particular, some code in Orbeon Forms had to be fixed due to Firefox 3 fixing this bug.

There are a few disappointments:

• Printing seems as broken as ever. Safari seems to do much better here, and I suspect that even IE does better, which is a real shame.
• While OS integration is much improved on the Mac with native widgets, it doesn't seem that 3.0 beta 2 is able to use the native spellchecker or Keychain.
  

In spite of this, Firefox 3 will be a good step forward, and I can't wait for further performance improvements such as the integration of the Tamarin VM.

Today I put in my computer a DVD from a Blackadder set, bought legally for me as a gift a few of years ago.

I happen to have plugged a European DVD into my US Mac, and you can guess what message I got from the Mac OS X Leopard DVD player. You got it: "The disc region does not match the drive region". Yeah, I can change it 4 times. Thanks, that's so generous.

This is simply insane. I had forgotten that this even existed as I don't play DVDs very often. Furthermore, in Switzerland where I am at the moment, standalone players are routinely sold region-free (although that may change with the upcoming and particularly crazy Swiss DMCA).

What is the sense of this region coding? This is the 21st century. People travel. They use the internet. The world is working hard on removing existing boundaries and I don't think it is permissible to build new, artificial barriers. Governments and industries that attempt to do that should be fought.

I understand that I am partly at fault because I am using an actual, physical DVD, a quite old media, and I should have ripped my DVDs a long time ago and be free of these issues. But I think it is still important to talk about region coding, because:

• Most content sold today is still in region-coded DVD format, while it could be region-free.
• Recent formats like Blu-ray support region coding as well.
• DRM in general is pervasive for video content online (if you except P2P networks), and kind or region-coded through stores like the iTunes Store which require credit cards registered in a certain country.

DRM is going away for music now, which is a good first step. There is hope that, as broadband and video-enabled devices become even more widespread, DRM on video will vanish on its own as that will be the only option left to the industry in the face of underground P2P filesharing. Unfortunately, in the meanwhile, as has been the case with music, a lot of harm will be done. I am not sure what we can do about it, except raise the awareness of the issue by talking about it.

PS: In my particular case, there are workarounds, like using VLC to play the DVD (although VLC seems to crash quite often). My previous laptop, bought 4 years ago, was made region-free right away. However on the Mac, making the drive region-free is not as mainstream a process. I wonder what non-technical users do in this kind of situation? Change the player's zone until it is finally locked in the wrong zone?

Here is what one of the presidential candidates, Mitt Romney, recently professed:

"Freedom requires religion, just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone."

This has to be one of the most nonsensical statements I have read in a while, and I can only qualify it, nicely, as blabber.

Freedom has nothing to do with religion. If anything, religion has hindered, and is still hindering, freedom in many parts of the world. America, the land of the free, was founded by atheists (at most Deists) and free-thinkers, contrary to what too many in America would like you to believe.

More generally, ethics do not correlate with religion: many religious people behave in a non-ethical way, and many non-religious people behave in an ethical way. There is lot of wishful thinking, but no evidence that I know of showing otherwise.

It is clear that Romney doesn't like to be asked about his religion (Mormonism), which is understandable, but talking nonsense is probably not a good solution to that particular problem: it just makes him sound dumb (which, after all, is fine in my book).

2007 will be remembered as the year the recording industry moved away from Digital Restrictions Management (DRM).

The latest positive development in this saga is that a few days ago Deutsche Grammophon (which belongs to Universal / Vivendi), mainly known by classical music and opera afficionados, opened its online music store.

The stores offers the entire DG music catalog in mp3 format encoded at 320 kbps. The web site is reasonably well done for a version 1.0. Search appears to function, album tracks list properly, and the previews are of good quality. My main disappointment is that there is no option to download music in a lossless format such as FLAC, but maybe I am expecting too much.

As the web site says, "Over 600 out-of-print CDs are made available again as downloads in this shop." Finally, somebody realizes that in the internet age, nothing should ever get "out-of-print" again.

I wish DG much success with this web site, even though it may be too late for the music industry to be rescued, as "For the last eight years the industry has been doing nothing more than rearranging the deck chairs on its own musical Titanic.".

On pourrait croire qu'en Suisse, pays champion de la démocracie directe, on ne puisse pas facilement passer une loi sans même que les citoyens en aient vent et sans que la presse n'en mentionne quoi que ce soit.

Pourtant, c'est bien ce qui semble se passer avec le "DMCA" suisse. La SUISA avait déjà réussi récemment à voler au consommateur CHF 80 par lecteur mp3. Ceci était présenté comme la seule façon de garder le droit à la copie privée. Une loi enrageante, mais qui au moins n'entachait pas la liberté des consommateurs.

Maintenant, une nouvelle loi proposée est bien pire: elle semble même aller plus loin que le DMCA américain par certains aspects. Voir cet article pour plus de détails: c'est une vraie folie qu'on essaie d'imposer à des citoyens suisses complètement malinformés ou désinformés. Lisez également ce billet web écrit par Cory Doctorow. Il appelle cette loi "brutale", et il a raison.

Le gouvernement suisse apparait aussi corrompu (au sens "corruption du processus politique" proposé par Larry Lessig) que celui des Etats-Unis ou de la France. Ce n'est guère une vraie surprise, mais j'en reste déçu. Quant à la presse, en particulier en Suisse Romande, on ne peut que la blâmer pour sa médiocrité.

En attendant, faites passer le mot et signez le référendum.