On Saturday I visited a friend’s house to see if I could help them with slowness problems on their home computer. This was a six-year-old machine running XP with 448MB RAM. I observed that on startup Windows Update would run and while running, pretty much all the RAM in the system was consumed by Windows, wuauclnt.exe and svchost.exe (which assists Windows Update). During this time, starting Firefox or IE took minutes; the machine would thrash itself senseless. This state lasted for quite a long time, about half an hour, probably exacerbated by my attempts to get stuff done. Once it subsided, Firefox started quickly and ran well.

This is apparently a known problem and some kind of Microsoft regression.

Under these conditions, Firefox startup time and other metrics are bound to be awful.

Update I forgot to mention, but the Microsoft malware checker was also running at the same time as Windows Update and contributing significantly to resource usage. I guess it checks the downloaded and installed updates for malware...

This week's Windows Weekly broadcast spends about 20 minutes (from 2:00 to just past 20:00) on the topic of Microsoft banning competing browsers from Windows on ARM.

Paul and Mary Joe do a really good job of explaining things. The one thing I'd like to highlight, and Paul touches on this, is that were talking about more than just IE on the classic desktop on Windows on ARM. We're also talking about being disadvantaged in the Metro environment. That's actually the larger of the two issues.

Internet Explorer is basically one browser with two front ends. The back-end is basically the same in classic and Metro and it has access to special Windows APIs that no other app on Metro has access to. That means that this is not just a problem of other browsers being excluded from the classic desktop on Windows on ARM, but other browsers are also at an extreme disadvantage on Metro compared to IE.

IE on Metro has access to the full win32 API, unlike any other Metro style app -- including third party browsers. Without that access, it's simply impossible for other browsers to compete with IE on Metro. No other browser would be able to have a modern JavaScript engine -- Microsoft's JavaScript engine would be 10-30 times faster than any other browser's because IE has privileges on Metro that let it mark memory as executable (something you need for a JIT to make JS fast). No other browser would be able to compete with IE in terms of stability and security because IE has access to APIs for creating extra processes and brokering between those processes so it can sandbox tabs and plug-ins and generally build a more secure product. No other browser on Metro would have access to those APIs.

So, when Paul and Mary Jo talk about how Microsoft could make things right with third parties by just not having classic desktop IE on Windows on ARM, yes, that would be a small step, but it's not the classic desktop environment we actually want. No one wants to spend time in that environment on a Windows on ARM machine. What we want, and what IE has, is access to the classic win32 APIs that power the classic desktop while in Metro mode.

On x86, we had the same exact problem. Firefox on Metro did not have access to the same APIs as IE on Metro. Microsoft solved the problem by creating a new category of Windows 8 program called Metro style enabled desktop browsers. But what Microsoft was really doing there was saying "Your Metro browser can use your classic browser's back-end, which has access to the full win32 API" which is precisely what IE was doing.

Microsoft should provide the same exception on Windows on ARM and allow browsers on Metro to access the full win32 API just like IE does.

update check out that awesome 2004 Firefox 1.0 New York Times poster behind Paul :-)

"The U.S. antitrust ruling requires that Microsoft disclose all of the interfaces internal to Windows called by 'middleware' within the operating system, such as the browser, the media player, and so forth. In this way, competitors in these categories will know that they can plug into Windows to get the services in the same way that these built-in Windows features do. This has worked well, and Microsoft will continue to disclose these interfaces even after the U.S. antitrust ruling expires."

Let's start with these.

1. Open Protocols. Microsoft commits that all the protocols in [Windows] that are used by any other Microsoft product will be made openly available to the developer community in a non-discriminatory fashion. These Open Protocols may include protocols that implement industry standards.

2. Open APIs. Microsoft commits that all the APIs in [Windows] that are used by any other Microsoft product will be made openly available to the developer community in a non-discriminatory fashion. These Open APIs may include APIs that implement industry standards.

3. Open Access. Microsoft will publish its documentation for these Open Protocols and Open APIs on its website so that all developers will have the benefit of this technical information in a manner that takes advantage of the nature of open discussion on the web. Microsoft will not require developers to obtain a license, or to pay a royalty or other fee, to have access to all this information....

via Microsoft Interoperability Principles

This is the single best article I've read all week on the topic. If you read this a couple of times, you will walk away with a better understanding of this issue than pretty much everyone you know, including many of the people writing about it.

Third Party Browsers Blocked on Windows 8 for ARM? by Kshitij Sobti

This is another really good article that helps to explain some of the "What about Apple? Aren't they doing the same thing?" questions I've been hearing.

Mozilla on new browser brouhaha: Microsoft, Apple different cases by Gregg Keizer

Senate Judiciary Committee staffers plan to take a look at allegations that Microsoft has made it difficult for competing Web browsers to run on a certain version of Windows, an aide to Antitrust subcommittee Chairman Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) told The Hill Thursday.

That's an interesting development.

The new Bing is really nice. They caught up with Google on algorithmic search last year, IMO (at least in the US.) This update catches them up in "take direct action" department and pushes well ahead in the social integration area. I think that team really nailed it with social integration. Good for them.

continued from Firefox on Windows on ARM - Microsoft Says No

It's not precisely "running a browser in Classic" that matters for Windows on ARM. It's that running a browser in Classic is the only way that Microsoft has allowed us to get access to the APIs that a browser needs to deliver modern capabilities and performance in Classic AND Metro.

A browser running exclusively in Metro does not have the APIs necessary to compete with IE or any other modern browser.

On x86, Microsoft has given browser vendors the same privileges and APIs that IE uses. They have not done this on ARM.

That's why Windows Classic on ARM matters.

update: I've been asked by a couple of people on Twitter and email to elaborate. Let me give it a try.

On x86 Windows 8 PCs, there are three kinds of software programs.

First, there are Classic programs that are basically the same as they are Windows 7. Because of the rich win32 API available in Classic, these kinds of programs can be really powerful (or not,) but they can only operate in the Classic environment and cannot use any of the cool new features available in Metro and they cannot be run in Metro. In this category you can think of programs like Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Word.

Second, there are Metro apps that are touch-focused, simpler, but have rich interactions between themselves and Metro and other Metro apps. These apps have access to some cool new Metro features but they live in a Metro sandbox and cannot use any of the more powerful features available from the Classic win32 environment -- APIs necessary for building a modern browser. In this category you can find apps like Angry Birds, Microsoft Stocks, or Hulu.

Third, there are Metro style desktop enabled browsers. These are programs that straddle Classic and Metro. They have access to the underlying win32 API like Classic programs and they also have access to the cool new features of Metro. They can have a classic front end and a Metro front end but under the covers they're calling into both the Classic and Metro APIs. In this category you have Internet Explorer 10, Firefox, and likely other browsers including Chrome and Opera.

Microsoft has made it clear that the third category won't exist on Windows for ARM (unless you're Microsoft) and that neither will the first category (unless you're Microsoft.) That means that IE on ARM has access to win32 APIs -- even when it's running in Metro mode, but no other Metro browser has that same access. Without that access, no other browser has a prayer of being competitive with IE.

Happy to answer any questions in comments.

update 2: I've also been asked why Windows on ARM matters. It's for tablets, after all, and that's just a tiny sliver of the larger PC universe.

That's true today, but it's not going to be true next year and the year after and the year after. ARM will be migrating to laptop PCs and all-in-one PCs very quickly. If you read Microsoft's blog posts about Windows on ARM, you'll see that they expect ARM PCs to cover the whole spectrum. ARM chips are already being used in servers. This is not a tablet-only concern.

Microsoft is trying to lock out competing browsers when it comes to Windows running on ARM chips. IE is allowed there but not Firefox or Chrome or Opera or any other competitive browser. This is bad for the Web.

Here's what's going on. For Windows on X86, Microsoft is giving other browsers basically the same privileges it gives IE. It's not great that you don't get those privileges (certain API access) unless you're the default browser and I think that's deeply unfair (a post for later,) but at least we're able to build a competitive browser and ship it to Windows users on x86 chips.

But on ARM chips, Microsoft gives IE access special APIs absolutely necessary for building a modern browser that it won't give to other browsers so there's no way another browser can possibly compete with IE in terms of features or performance.

This is in direct violation of the promises they made to developers, users, and OEMs about browser choice in documents which mysteriously disappeared from Microsoft's site -- remember this? I sure do.

Here's a PDF of the pages that Microsoft disappeared in the run-up to their anti-choice decisions for the Windows OS running on ARM chips. Windows Principles - Empowering Choice, Opportunity, and Interoperability (PDF)

update: The Wall Street Journal has a blog post up titled Microsoft Accused of Hindering Firefox Browser and Stephen Shankland has posted Microsoft bans Firefox on ARM-based Windows, Mozilla says at CNET. The FT has also just posted Microsoft hit with complaint over Windows 8.

update 2:I've got more to say about this here.

Want to help make the Web a better place? Want to work with me?

I'm looking for a Senior Product Manager to help define the future of web browsing for half a billion Firefox users.

Mozilla pays well. We have great health benefits. And, honestly, how can you not want to work with me ;-)

Photo via david.ian.roberts, under a cc license

I was marveling over the boot times I get on this Samsung Series 9 Windows laptop, somewhere between 8 and 10 seconds, when it occurred to me that my Andriod phone, a fairly high-end Samsung Galaxy Nexus, doesn't seem to boot that fast. So, I decided to time it.

First I reset the phone to factory defaults, just in case there was something in there slowing the startup. (Note, I didn't do this to my Windows laptop.) Then I timed three boot ups and averaged them.

The average time to the unlock screen was 26 seconds! That's almost three times as long as it takes to boot Windows 7 on this Series 9 laptop. A top of the line Android phone running the latest stock Google Android OS shouldn't take three times as long as that "pig of an OS" Windows to boot on a medium performance laptop, right?

Now, I don't re-boot my phone or my laptop very often, so it's really the wake from sleep that matters and here the phone beats the laptop with a one second wake compared to a two to three second wake for the laptop. Still, phones need to boot faster :)

If you're following Mozilla development, you've no doubt heard something about "Kilimanjaro". If you already know what that's all about, then this post isn't for you. Enough people have asked me about it, though, I thought it worth a quick blogging.

Kilimanjaro is the coming together of Mozilla's Firefox browser for desktops; a brand new Firefox for Android phones; a preliminary version of the Mozilla mobile operating system, Boot to Gecko; the multi-OS, multi-device Mozilla web application runtime; the Mozilla Apps Marketplace; and Mozilla's user-centric identity system, Persona.

Taken together, these products and services will be something more than the sum of their parts. They will constitute the beginning of a powerful web-wide app ecosystem.

Kilimanjaro is version one dot oh of that ecosystem.

Here's what the early press reports are saying:

Mozilla is the first major tech company to unreservedly speak out against the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA. -c|net

While the Internet has been bristling with anger over the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, the Internet industry has been either silent or quietly supportive of the controversial bill. With one exception. -Forbes

Despite the apprehension felt by many over CISPA, the bill continues to have many high-profile supporters in the tech industry, including the likes of Intel, Oracle, and Microsoft. Mozilla, however, is speaking out... -The Verge

Here's what Mozilla said:

While we wholeheartedly support a more secure Internet, CISPA has a broad and alarming reach that goes far beyond Internet security. The bill infringes on our privacy, includes vague definitions of cybersecurity, and grants immunities to companies and government that are too broad around information misuse. We hope the Senate takes the time to fully and openly consider these issues with stakeholder input before moving forward with this legislation.

It's a shame that more aren't standing up here.

For the last year or so I've been using a nice little screenshot and clipping utility that makes sharing super easy. It's called TinyGrab. Unfortunately, those guys are all clownshoes these days. First I started seeing other peoples' screenshots in my account (and wondered how many of my screenshots were showing up in other accounts.) Last week I had a failed password reset that left my paid account basically dead and I've not been able to get support via email or Twitter. I guess I'm gonna put a block on those credit card charges. Leaving a paying customer stranded for a week is just not acceptable, IMO.

My interim solution -- while I wait on someone to build something better, is to use the Windows Snipping Tool and a public SkyDrive folder. It's stupid slow compared to TinyGrab but at least it works. Here's what I have.

First, I set a keyboard shortcut on the Snipping Tool (from its shortcut properties dialog) so I can bring it up quickly. Next I installed the Microsoft SkyDrive app which adds a SkyDrive folder to Windows Explorer so I have a public location to save the image. Third, I created a "public" folder in SkyDrive and opened that folder as a pinned tab in Firefox. Now, to share I simply (ugh!) hit Ctrl+Shift+3, snip a part of my screen, save to my SkyDrive folder, reload my Firefox SkyDrive tab, open the image in a new tab, copy the URL, paste the URL into a URL shortening service and I'm done.

OK. That sucks. There are a couple of solutions I can imagine. First, Microsoft could add a one-click "Share to SkyDrive" feature to the Windows Snipping Tool that would give the file a unique name and drop it into a specified SkyDrive folder. Next, Microsoft could offer a "copy short URL" to the SkyDrive file context menu or sidebar. Those would make this an almost tolerable solution.

The second, and I think much better solution, would be for some awesome developer out there on the Internets to write a SkyDrive snipping and sharing app for Windows. The SkyDrive API looks pretty complete and I imagine a simple Windows program that captured screen areas wouldn't be too difficult.

A "perfect" tool, IMO, would work like this. I'd hit a keyboard shortcut and I'd get a crosshair icon that lightboxed my selection. Releasing the selection would copy that area, make it into a png, drop the file into a specified SkyDrive folder and copy its URL to my clipboard. Super simple. Super useful.

Any takers? Or suggestions for an existing tool that won't leave me pissed off like TinyGrab?

I've been using a second generation Samsung Series 9 laptop for about a week now and here are my early thoughts.

First off, this is the most visually attractive Windows laptop on the market today. There's just nothing ugly about it -- no "nice except for the ..." problems that all other 2012 Windows laptops suffer.

Photo from Samsung, and used without any license

The chassis is super-thin. It's thinner than the 13" Macbook Air and where the Air prefers straight lines and wedges, the Series 9 is designed around a few thoughtfully crafted curves. There's the obvious curves at the ports area and the hinge and base of the lid, but this motif also extends to the gentle recess of the keyboard and the rounded rectangle carve-out for the trackpad. These lines help to give the Series 9 an even thinner profile than the Air without looking anything like an Air clone.

The bezel around the screen is quite small. It's 3/8 of an inch on the right and left sides and 1/2 an inch on the top. Further, the actual LCD goes right up to that edge so you don't get the giant bezel "black eye" look that so many laptops suffer. Surprisingly, with 180,000 more pixels than the 13" Macbook Air, the Series 9 13" is smaller by almost 1/2 inch in width and 1/3 inch in length. When closed, it's also thinner by about 1/6 of an inch at its thickest point.

The laptop's Samsung branding is mostly under control -- something that many Windows laptops make a mess of. The off center, slightly raised SΛMSUNG label on the outside of the lid is a strikingly bright silver but not so large that it's obnoxious. They could have done away with the nearly as large but not so shiny SΛMSUNG white silk-screened badge on the interior below the screen, IMO. Of course the underside of the laptop is a bit of a mess with silk-screened Intel and Windows logos, but out of sight is nearly out of mind.

There are a couple of seams I don't like, including where the inside hinge cover meets the screen bezel, but the main seam for the base of the chassis being wrapped under the edge and mostly invisible is a welcome move for a Windows laptop and the design is well ahead enough compared to other Windows laptops that I'm willing to overlook the couple of places where it falls short in hiding its seams.

Photo from SamsungTomorrow Flickr account, and used without any license

The aluminum shell coloring on this model is called "Mineral Ash Black". It's a rich gray matte finish that's actually leaning a bit towards dark slate blue (compare with the much truer gray finish of the trackpad, for example.) The edges of the shell give the appearance of having been carved off revealing a bright aluminum interior. It's a nice accent but I would have preferred it to not have been carried through to the cut aluminum edge surrounding the trackpad, where I find it somewhat distracting.

The black keys of the chicklet keyboard have white labels for the primary keys and light blue labels for the Fn keys. When the keyboard backlight is active, the key labels glow a nice pale green (and a blue-ish green for the Fn keys.) There are also three bright blue indicator LEDs that glow rather strong at night. I'd prefer if the power LED, "radios are on" LED, and Fn lock LED weren't quite so strong and blue, but they're not overwhelming and at least it's only three little LEDs and not the mess of huge ones you see on previous Samsung laptops.

So, for a fairly clean laptop, there are a fair number of colors here: the dark matte slate blue shell, the bright silver branding, the brushed aluminum accents, the gray trackpad, the black keys, the white silk-screening, the green backlighting, and the blue LEDs. Surprisingly, the colors mostly all work well and come off as restrained compared to other models.

That's the look, so what about the feel. First, this thing is solid. It's super-solid. There's no flexing and the hinge is fluid, opens quite wide, and holds the screen with no movement at all even at the hinge boundaries. Second, it's really light. It's the lightest 13" laptop I've ever used. At 2.56 lbs, it's nearly half a pound lighter than the 13" Macbook Air and about half way between the 13" and 11" Air weights. Carrying the laptop around the office, both open and closed, is a joy.

The keyboard is shallow but it's not causing me typos except where the key layout differs from my other laptops. There's no comparing any chicklet keyboard to the classic ThinkPad keyboards I love so much, but it compares favorably to other chicklet keyboards I've used (except the ThinkPad Edge keyboard which is actually pretty nice.) Still, if you can't live without deep key travel, I recommend avoiding this machine. If there's any place where this laptop doesn't stand up to competitors, it's the shallow travel of the keys.

The trackpad is made by Elan and it's much better than anything I've used on other Windows machines. It's certainly not as refined or as advanced as you'll get on a Mac laptop, but two finger scrolling, right and left click, pinch to zoom, and tap to click all work quite well. The Elan-supplied trackpad utility doesn't have as many options as I'd like but it did let me set two-finger tap as middle-click so I'm satisfied. As I do with the keys from my ThinkPad x220, I'll also miss the ThinkPad Trackpoint. Fortunately, this trackpad with decent two-finger scrolling works well enough that I'll get by. If you've been avoiding Windows laptops because of the absolutely horrendous trackpads, this one warrants a test. As I said, it's not perfect (like a Mac's is) but it's functional.

I've covered look and feel, so what's left? Ah yes, performance and specs. I haven't run any benchmarks (and don't intend to) but here's what I will say. The Series 9 does what I need it to plenty fast. It boots up in less than 10 seconds! It wakes from sleep in less than 2 seconds.

The screen is a matte 1600x900 which is a small step up in resolution from the 13" Macbook Air but not quite the horizontal resolution I'd prefer. The matte screen is a huge win for those like me who dread the highly reflective glossies Apple is pushing these days. It's also very bright (400 NITS) and I have to run with it turned down a couple of notches during the day except when I'm outside in bright sunlight. In the sun, with the brightness cranked, it's just stellar. At night, the lowest brightness setting is just about right but I sometimes wish for one or two steps dimmer when the room is pitch dark. Colors are reasonably accurate next to my well-tuned external IPS monitors and contrast is great in all but the widest vertical viewing angles where it's still tolerable but not great.

The processor is a second generation dual-core Intel Core i5-2467M clocked at 1.6Ghz and while that's plenty for my tasks, if you're trying to set records or doing really processor intense work all day long, you might want to wait on the upgrade to Intel's Ivy Bridge which I expect sometime later this year. Ivy Bridge should bring a nice boost to power, graphics, and battery life.

Speaking of battery life, I've been spending a lot of time on battery this last week. I've measured anywhere from 5 hours to 6 hours depending on screen brightness and how actively I was using it. This is very close to what I've experienced with my limited Macbook Air usage, and for a Windows machine of this size and weight, it's not bad at all.

The Series 9 comes with a 128 GB SSD, and 4 GB of RAM. I look forward to future versions with larger SSDs but I'm really not complaining here.

There are two USB ports, a 2.0 and a 3.0, and micro HDMI port. The LAN port and the VGA port require dongles. With so many co-workers using Airs and the office video set-ups all including Mac hook-ups, I'd have preferred a mini DisplayPort for compatibility. One of these days we'll all get on the same page with display ports :-)

One last note on specs. The audio on this thing is LOUD. It's loud and pretty clear. The sound field is wide too. Dynamic range isn't great but it's not bad either. I was really surprised by this volume though considering the tiny package. It may be the loudest speakers I've experienced in a laptop. That sound, combined with its decent LCD, and this machine makes for a nice movie-watching experience. The glossy screens will be a bit better for movies, but IMO they're far less nice for non-movie content. The Series 9 is a good balance.

The second generation Samsung Series 9 is well ahead of all the other Windows laptops in looks, feel, and power, and it matches or beats the Macbook Air in many respects. This is the first Windows machine I could say that about with a straight face since I began looking for a Windows Air alternative several years ago. If you're looking for a Windows laptop that can stand its ground with the Macbook Air, this is the one.

Photo by Flickr user Nokia RSA, used under a cc license

I've spent the last three to four months immersed in Windows 8 Metro, from working with Google and Opera teams to investigate its capabilities, to watching hours and hours of Build videos, to reading a much documentation as I could stomach and spending a large piece of my time on Windows 8. I've got a Samsung Series 7 Slate, a ThinkPad laptop, an HP all-in-on TouchSmart, and a Sony all-in one L Series each running Windows 8 and I've spent countless hours forcing myself into a Metro mindset so that I can better help Mozilla define a compelling Firefox on Metro experience.

Recently, I decided that I was going to go a step further and move over to a Windows Phone to experience even more Metro. Because I'm not a fan of the the super-sized smartphones, I sought out a solid Windows Phone device in the sub-4" range. It didn't take me long to see there was really only one choice, one phone that shined above all others: the Lumia 800 from Nokia.

I've been using it for a while now and I'm posting here to say that it is without a doubt the most beautiful phone experience I've had.

The Lumia 800 phone body is a dense and brightly colored polycarbonate. It's available in cyan, magenta, and black. I have the cyan version.

The polycarbonate feels amazing in your hand. It's got the heft and rigidity of metal and ceramic, but the touch isn't as cold and unforgiving, and the ever so slight texture of surface is easily gripped with absolutely no fear that it could slip from your hand. The CMYK print-maker-inspired colors are pure and powerful -- simply stunning.

The sides of the body have a true round edge while the top and bottom follow the ark of the curved glass face, starting with a gentle bevel that culminates in a sharp cut.

The front of the phone is a beautifully curved dark black glass set just into the polycarbonate with carefully beveled edges that complete a face that's nearly symmetrical with the polycarbonate back. The phone's glass and screen are perfectly balanced in both landscape and portrait mode.

Power and volume buttons, along with a dedicated camera button, raise just slightly out of the right side of the phone. The silver buttons have edges and texture that make them an easy target for your fingers with no learning curve. The camera button is positioned precisely under your right index finger when holding the phone in landscape mode and button travel is just deep enough to feel a complete press, better than most other phone hardware buttons I've used.

I'll leave this quick review focused on the hardware interfaces and follow up with some thoughts on the Windows Phone operating system experience in a later post.

One parting note though. I've spent time on considerably more capable devices including most recently a Samsung Galaxy Nexus. While the Lumia 800 isn't even in same league when it comes to specs, it's a generation ahead in user experience. As I said at the opening, the Lumia 800 is the most beautiful phone experience I've had. It's nearly a perfect piece of design.

Photo by Flickr user bitninja, used under a creative commons license

As some of you know, I've been using Windows 8 Metro for nearly 7 months (since its debut at Microsoft BUILD conference in September.) More recently I decided to investigate Windows Phone to get even further immersed in the Metro experience. Windows Phone (7.5) has been a pretty nice experience overall. But there's one thing that definitely comes to light using Windows Phone and Windows 8 together.

Windows 8 Metro is very much incomplete. Everything that's beautiful about Windows Phone's fast and fluid experience is a bit clunky feeling in Windows 8. All of the amazing typography and text animations are crude and under-developed in Windows 8. All of the clever physics of Windows Phone have been reduced to simplistic movements in Windows 8.

I'm hopeful that Microsoft can bring some more of the spirit of Metro to the desktop, because it really is a nice modern experience on phones. I haven't toyed around with Windows Phone 7 so perhaps it shipped in an equally unfinished state and they got it right with the follow-up release. If they can get more of Metro in time for Windows 8, great. If not, I hope Windows 9 follows quickly.

Photo by Flickr user tanakawho, used under a creative commons license

So here's the deal about touchscreens and Windows 8. There are lots of x86 touchscreen devices available that can run Windows 8. This is because Windows 7 had pretty good support for touch and multitouch and so more laptops and all-in-one desktops made their way to consumers. I've used an HP all-in-one Touchsmart 610, a Sony VAIO L Series all-in-one, a Samsung Series 7 Slate, and a Lenovo ThinkPad X220 tablet. Each of these machine was designed for Windows 7, so their CPU and memory configurations; their keyboards, trackpads, cameras, and other inputs; and their drives and ports are all very compatible with Windows 8. They're both compatible in terms of giving you decent performance and in terms of available drivers. Add to that a touchscreen and you might think you've got yourself a perfect Windows 8 kit. Unfortunately, it's not quite that rosy. While almost all of the machines I've tried were pretty much fully driver-compatible with Windows 8, and all of them had plenty of horsepower to drive Windows 8 with great performance, the touch experience ranged from absolutely unusable to wonderful.

Microsoft explains this quite well over at the Building Windows 8 blog. What it boils down to is that touchscreens that were built for Windows 7 focused on accuracy and increased capabilities (like multitouch) in the main work area of the screen at the expense of touch sensitivity and accuracy at the edges of the screen. That made fine sense in the Windows 7 world where most of your work takes place away from the edges. Unfortunately it can be a huge problem with Windows 8 because basic Windows navigation requires swipes that comes in from the edge of the screen and with all apps running in a full-screen mode, you're far more likely to find yourself working near the edges.

Another problem with some of the Windows 7 touchscreen devices is that they have giant raised bezels. Even if a machine has decent edge sensitivity in its touch panel, if you cannot easily swipe your finger from off-screen to on-screen, you may not be able to navigate Windows well.

So, what have I learned over the last few months of testing various configurations. Let's go from best to worst:

Photo by Flickr user Stuart Bryant, used under a creative commons license

The Samsung Series 7 Slate (tablet) is really outstanding. It has edge detection that hasn't failed me once. It's got an edge-to-edge glass face so your swipes from off-screen to on are a breeze. It's got 8 finger multitouch so all Windows 8 touch gestures are fully supported. Finally, as you pan around, the content "sticks" to your finger really well and there's no problem selecting text with touch and drag. I'll also note that this x86 tablet is something of a beast. It comes with a 1.6GHz Core i5-2467M processor, 128GB SSD, 4GB of RAM, and a 400 nits, matte, 11.6", 1366 x 768, LED backlit panel. (Oh, and yeah, and it's got a fan ;-) Teamed up with its Slate PC Dock and bluetooth keyboard and you've got a pretty compelling Windows 8 device.

The Lenovo X220 Tablet Convertible is also excellent. Edge detection is solid. The 1366 x 768, 300 NITs bright panel is pretty nice, though a bit glossy and reflective for my taste. There's no raised bezel to get in your way. Swipe and drag gestures really stick to your fingers and the 5 finger multitouch covers all of the most common gestures. It's possible that you'll encounter apps that need more than 5 finger touch, so if that's a concern to you then you should probably wait for the next generation from Lenovo which I'm sure will up that to ten or more. The X220T is the only touch laptop I've tested but if you know ThinkPads, then you know this machine. It's tough and practical with plenty of configuration options. It's not beautiful and it's not light-weight like the latest crop of UltraBooks, but if you want a machine with great inputs (nice multitouch and the best keyboard in the business, IMO) it's a fine choice for Windows 8. I'll note that it also works great in the Windows 8 Classic mode which is basically Windows 7 with a few tweaks.

Photo by Flickr user Matt Niemi, used under a creative commons license

The Sony Vaio L Series all-in-one machine is OK on Windows 8 and I'm hoping it can get slightly better with touchscreen driver updates. The PC has a 24" screen with glass that extends about an inch beyond the LCD on all sides so it doesn't have the raised bezel problem. (Though it does have a raised plastic bezel, it's far enough away from the screen that it's not a problem.) Sony also brags of a touch technology that extends beyond the edge of the LCD to provide off-screen gestures, but there's no support for that in Windows 8 yet. I'm hoping that Sony or MS can make a driver update that takes advantage of that to improve the screen's edge detection. The touchscreen panel has several shortcomings. First, it only supports 2 finger gestures. This means that basic Windows 8 gestures like pinch to zoom and turn to rotate work, but that's really not enough. Also, it doesn't have great edge sensitivity. It's possible to learn how to position your finger just so as you swipe in from the screen edge to get a pretty good hit rate, but that's less than ideal. For those of you who have this machine or are thinking about getting one because of its other great qualities, like a Core i7 quad-core 2.50GHz processor, NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M GPU with 1GB RAM, Blu-ray player, 8GB of RAM, built-in TV tuner, and all around good looks, here's the trick to making it work: you can't use the tip of your finger. You have to use the face of your finger (where your fingerprint is) and you have to land your finger with some of it off-screen and some onscreen. For the swipe up and down gestures to raise the application toolbars, you don't actually swipe. You simply press your finger across that boundary. For the swipe in from the right, you do have to swipe in some but it helps if you have a very slight pause after initially pressing your finger down (again, with about half of your fingerprint off-screen and half on.) You'll see the very edge of the Windows charms bar become visible and if you start your swipe then, it works great. I know that sounds awful, but once you do it a few times it's pretty easy.

Photo by Flickr user Rupert Taylor-Price, used under a creative commons license

The HP Touchsmart 610 is a pretty nice all-in-one PC for Windows 7 but it's an absolutely horrible Windows 8 PC. The PC guts, including a 3.4GHz Core i7-2600 CPU, 8GB of RAM, Blu-ray, built-in TV tuner, and NVIDIA GeForce GT 425M GPU with 2GB RAM, are all pretty awesome. The reclining hinge that transforms it from a vertical orientation to a near-horziontal surface is actually quite nice. The machine has great (and very loud) speakers. The 23-inch, 1920 x 1080 panel is bright and beautiful. Unfortunately, the combination of limited 2 finger touch support, a giant plastic bezel, and just awful edge detection make Windows gestures simply impossible. I don't mean hit or miss; I mean impossible. There is no way to use this machine in Metro effectively without a mouse and keyboard. If you have one of these machines, I encourage you to keep it running Windows 7. I like the 610 a lot, but it's simply not Windows 8 ready.

One final note. Windows 8, even Metro, works fairly well with a mouse and keyboard. I have it loaded up on a bog standard ThinkPad T510 and the keyboard and trackpad/trackpoint controls work to navigate the system and use most of the apps and features just fine. It's not the preferred mode, but it's also not impossible. If you tried the Developer Preview that Microsoft released at Build last year, and were disappointed at how poorly the Metro experience integrated keyboard and mouse controls, the Consumer Preview has come a long way.

I've got a couple of touchscreen monitors on order, and as soon as I've had a chance to test them out, I'll blog and let you know how that goes.

Brian Bondy posted on our Firefox for Windows 8 Metro progress. We've got a solid proof of concept in short order thanks to Brian and Jim Mathies, with some helpful support from XUL Fennec lead Mark Finkle. Go team!

Johnathan posted about our 6 weeks release cadence and it's totally worth your time to read it.

Earlier this year I posted an update the 2012 Firefox roadmap and stressed the importance of executing on that vision. There are a lot of ambitious efforts in that Firefox roadmap and the other Mozilla roadmaps for Developer Tools, Platform, Apps, Identity, etc. and 2012 is going to be crazy competitive, with major operating system releases, a continued steep rise in mobile computing, and far too many threats to user sovereignty to count.

The good news, great news IMO, is that we're already kicking some serious butt this year and we're on track, early as it is, to having the best year yet for Firefox, Mozilla, and the Web.

The first quarter of 2012 is wrapping up and that makes it a great time to take a look back at what we've accomplished and a look forward to what's coming up next.

Let's reverse that and start with what's coming next and then move to what's already shipped.

In Q2 we have a lot of exciting things coming. Much of that feature and quality work is already well underway but still needs further development or testing help before it's completed and shipped to our users.

A few of the features are far enough along to have made it into the latest Aurora and Beta builds. If you're still using Firefox release builds, now would be a great time to join the Aurora or Beta program and help us finalize this work. You'll be doing yourself and our users a big service.

A taste of the Q2 roadmap, this is some of what you'll find there:

Firefox Home Tab additions: Firefox's start page, AKA Firefox Home Tab, is where users start their browsing session and where they land when they've closed their last tab. In addition to easy search, Firefox Home will become a launch point for managing all of your Firefox data.

A New Tab page powered by the Awesomebar: For keyboard users, opening a new tab and visiting a top site is super-easy thanks to the Awesomebar. For mouse users, Firefox's new tab page will include a "speed dial" like feature that provides Awesomebar-powered shortcut tiles for super-fast navigation.

Restore Firefox: For various reasons, a Firefox profile can become damaged causing performance and stability problems. Users will be able to quickly and easily restore Firefox without losing their passwords, history, and bookmarks.

Awesomebar In-Line URL auto-complete: In addition to the amazing Awesomebar pop-up list, users will have easy in-line address completion for even faster navigation.

Smooth scrolling: Scrolling pages is one of the most common user interactions on the web. With a new scrolling implementation, users will find web page scrolling to be consistently silky smooth.

Automatic Session Restore with Tabs on Demand: Most users prefer starting the browser right where they left off. Firefox is moving to a model that restores all tabs when a user starts up the browser but delays the loading of background tabs until they are needed. This will improve the performance and usability of Firefox just after launch.

Again, I encourage anyone interested enough in Mozilla and Firefox to be reading this blog to move your browsing over to the Aurora or Beta channel. You'll not only get a sneak peek at what's coming in a couple of months, you'll also be helping Mozilla deliver the best possible experience to almost half a billion users around the globe.

So that (and more) is what's coming up in the next few months. It's exciting stuff. But what about the first quarter? We had a very successful first quarter of 2012, delivering some really nice improvements. Here's what we prioritized in the Q1 roadmap and how those features made it out to users:

Add-on Compatibility: Our experience has given us confidence that the overwhelming majority of add-ons are not broken by new Firefox releases, so we are changing Firefox behavior from assuming add-ons are broken with each new release and managing exceptions with an allow list to assuming add-ons are compatible with each new release and managing exceptions with a disallow list.

Because of how we managed add-on compatibility based on major browser version and the change last year to a faster release cadence, many users found themselves inconvenienced as each new Firefox would disable some of their add-ons. We put a plan together to fix that and planned on having it completed early this year. We finished this work and shipped it to hundreds of millions of Firefox users on January 31st and the results so far are overwhelmingly positive. We still have some more to do for add-ons that contain binary components, but this was a huge leap forward in comaptibility with no major fall-out.

Chrome Migration: Firefox already supports migrating from other popular browsers. Users moving from Chrome to Firefox should be able to bring their data with them. We are building this capability into Firefox.

When we were getting ready to ship Firefox 1.0 way back in November of 2004 (yes, it really was more than 7 years ago,) one of the critical features we knew we had to have was a seamless migration from IE to Firefox. We knew that if people couldn't pick right up in Firefox where they left off in IE, that they probably wouldn't keep using it. Over the last couple of years, Google's Chrome browser has grown to a significant audience and an increasing number of new Firefox users are now coming from Chrome and it's important that these new Firefox users have a great experience. In support of that we kicked off a project to build migrators for all of the important Chrome data types. With Firefox 11, the release we shipped about a week ago, we delivered Chrome migrators for cookies, history, and bookmarks. We still have some follow-up work to get passwords, form data, and settings but we're making good progress.

Refreshed Media Controls: HTML5 media is increasing on the Web. The default media controls are being refined for usability and to include controls for new HTML5 features like full-screen viewing.

Mozilla pioneered the HTML5 <video;> element and we've been improving it ever since. While many sites provide their own controls for <video> playback, browsers also need to support a fall-back set of controls. These are available when a site doesn't specify its own controls or when a video is viewed standalone rather than in a web page. Even fall-back controls should be beautiful, comprehensive, and easy to use. Most of the updates to our <video;> controls have already reached users in Firefox 11 and the remainder is currently in Beta testing and will be released with Firefox 12 about a month from now.

Add-ons Sync: Firefox Sync makes it easy to move between computers and devices. In addition to syncing passwords, bookmarks, and history between Firefox installs, users are going to be able to sync add-ons.

For those of you with multiple computers, either a work computer and a home computer or a PC and an Android device, Mozilla has offered powerful syncing features for some time. You could sync your bookmarks, history, passwords, preferences, and tabs quickly and easily. But lots of folks asked for one more feature, the ability to sync their add-ons. This makes a lot of sense given how much people love to customize Firefox with add-ons. So in the just shipped Firefox 11 you can now sync your add-ons.

Firefox Hotfix: There are small issues that can occasionally affect Firefox users after a release. Correcting those small issues should not require a full Firefox update. With a new hotfix system, Mozilla can patch minor issues in Firefox without requiring a browser restart.

Every six weeks, Mozilla makes a new version of Firefox available to almost half a billion people. These updates are filled with new features, security and crash fixes, performance improvements, and new HTML5 capabilities. With so much changing in each Firefox release, it's necessary to restart the program for the updates to take effect. But every once in a while, Mozilla needs to ship a small change, perhaps a tweak to a preference or a minor security-related change. In those cases, we need to be able to deliver an update without the overhead of a full Firefox update and restart. Our new hotfix system, which makes that possible, shipped in Firefox 11 last week and so we can now patch that release or any newer releases without requiring a browser restart.

Developer Tools advancements: See the Developer Tools roadmap.

Mozilla launched the era of powerful tools for Web developers back before the launch of Firefox 1.0 with something called the DOM Inspector. The author of that tool went on to create Firebug, an extension for Firefox that really set the standard for modern Web developer tools. (Mozilla continues to invest in the development of Firebug.) Today, all of the major browsers ship a set of built-in Web developer tools and Firefox is no different. In Firefox 10 and 11 we added several really nice features including a beautiful (and powerful) Style Inspector, a Style Editor, and the very cool "Tilt" 3D View. There's still a lot more coming from the Firefox Developer Tools team, but we've made some really great strides in this first quarter of this year.

Web Platform advancements: See the Web Platform roadmap.

One of Mozilla's most important contributions to the Web has been our fierce advocacy for and the design and implementation of powerful Web platform features. Our recent releases of Firefox, and its Gecko rendering engine continue to push the boundary, delivering great HTML5 features like the HTML5 Full Screen API, element.outerHTML, the loop attribute for media elements, the CSS text-size-adjust property, the new <bdi> element for bi-directional text isolation & its supporting CSS properties, anti-aliasing for WebGL 3D content, CSS3 3D-Transforms, and a test implementation of SPDY.

Oh, and the Mozilla platform developers implemented a bunch of new device APIs so you can use the DOM to access things like the device's battery, vibrator, camera, and sms and telephony stacks. They've also got experimental implementations of a gamepad API and a mouselock API. All of that is coming together in an amazing new Mozilla project called Boot2Gecko.

And if that wasn't enough, we've launched a developer preview of Mozilla's Apps Marketplace as well as Mozilla's user-centric ID solution, Persona.

It's been an exciting Q1 for Mozilla and Firefox. We're already deep into Q2 work so stay tuned for further updates on our roadmap progress.

A while back I wrote about the end of Firefox support for Windows 2000 and a new minimum requirement of SP2 for Windows XP. Today, we've posted about that and the end of support for Firefox 3.6.

After two years of regular updates, we'll end our support for Firefox 3.6 on April 24th. In the years since Firefox 3.6, we've make incredible improvements to Firefox, including phenomenal HTML5 capabilities, Firefox Sync, faster JavaScript performance, support for the Do Not Track header, and an easier, quieter update process. Barring any major stability or security issues found over the next few weeks, Firefox 3.6.28 will be our last 3.6 release.

We strongly advise our users to upgrade from Firefox 3.6, as they will no longer receive critical security updates as of April 24th. In support of Firefox 3.6 users in organizations, we've delivered on our promise to implement the Extended Support Release plan three months ahead of ending support for Firefox 3.6. Enterprises and organizations should complete qualification and deployment of the ESR over the next month.

We'd also like to take this opportunity to announce that our minimum supported Windows version will change from Windows 2000 to Windows XP SP2 in Firefox 13. We never change minimum requirements lightly, but this support change allows us to significantly improve Firefox performance on Windows by using a more modern build system. Windows XP users are advised to update to the latest service pack, and Windows 2000 users should consider upgrading ahead of the June release of Firefox 13.

Happy to try to answer any questions you have. Oh, and if you're a Windows 2000 user and you simply cannot upgrade your PC to a more modern Windows version, I'm sure the good folks over at Opera will be happy to help you out. Moving to Opera means you'll not only get continued security updates, but you'll also be able to enjoy a modern browser experience.

I spent several days composing a lengthy post on this topic and just as I was getting ready to put it up, I ran across this slashdot comment from Mozilla's Robert O'Callahan.

If not supporting H.264 isn't reducing H.264 usage, but reduces the influence of Firefox by turning users away from Firefox, and increases the usage of Flash vs HTML5 video, then not supporting H.264 is a net lose for freedom and standards on the Web and supporting H.264 is the right thing to do for our mission.

That's basically my entire 7 paragraph post in one sentence. I'll save you reading what I wrote because this is much shorter and clearer.

ROC leads Mozilla's multimedia efforts and is also a fierce advocate for video freedom on the Web so I listen very closely when he speaks on these issues. I believe that in this one sentence he's made a convincing case that supporting H.264 in the <video> element in Gecko is the right thing to do for Mozilla's mission.

Mitchell Baker and Brendan Eich both have great blog posts up today covering the need to adjust our thinking about H.264 on the Web.

Brendan Eich: Video, user experience and our mission
Mitchell Baker: Video, Mobile, and the Open Web

I've been a part of Mozilla for nearly as long as Brendan and Mitchell and I've been a part of most of the really difficult decisions that we've made as a project for the last 12 years. I think that Mitchell and Brendan have made really solid cases for an adjustment but those posts are long so I want to highlight a couple of items in case you don't read all of what they've said.

One key value at Mozilla is giving our users a great experience. We want to build products that people love and that build openness and user sovereignty into the Web. "Products that people love" is a key part of this sentence. It's not a throw away phrase. It has meaning. It is a demanding goal and it must drive us -- just as the latter part about openness and user sovereignty drive us.

This says, better than I could the other day, why we should not frame this issue as trading our values against the easy or pragmatic path. Building products that people love is a Mozilla value. Building products that people love is not "the easy way out" or "a compromise", it is actually quite difficult and we've invested heavily over the years to do it.

Firefox supports only unencumbered formats from Gecko's <video> implementation. We rely on Flash fallback that authors invariably write, as shown above. Let that sink in: we, Mozilla, rely on Flash to implement H.264 for Firefox users.

And this gets to something I think is critically important. We already support H.264. We support it plus all the proprietary goop that comes with supporting H.264 via Flash.

Mozilla pioneered the HTML5 <video> element. We were the first to ship support for it and our support for the spec was far better and far more complete than what the other browsers shipped. The <video> element was a really exciting step forward for the Web. Unfortunately, for the last several years, while making sure Firefox had the best <video> implementation of all the browsers, Firefox has been discouraging use of the <video> element by favoring H.264 delivered via Flash. Because of this, the <video> element and all of the exciting possibilities for really mixing multimedia content with the rest of the Web have not realized their potential. Mozilla has been saying, in effect, "we prefer Flash over HTML5 video."

Is is for these reasons that I am firmly in support of enabling H.264/AAC for the <video> element. We will both advance HTML5 and the Web platform and make Firefox a product that more users can love.

Today I notices that many of my Firefox app tabs had back and forward buttons enabled. That's really not desirable for my use cases. I want the first item in the app tab history to be the actual app tab URL and not "new tab" or any other back history so that if I do accidentally navigate away, getting back to the original app tab URL is just two clicks away (right click on back button, go to the oldest item in the menu.) I want for back and forward to not be enabled so that if I accidentally hit the back or forward keyboard shortcut it doesn't take me away from the app tab.

So how does one make sure that the first page of an app tab is the page you want and not some back history -- and not the "new tab" page? Simple. Just focus the addressbar in each of your app tabs and hit alt+enter. That will open them all in new tabs with no back history and no forward history. Then close all your old app tabs and pin all the new ones.

Maybe no one else actually wants or needs this, but just in case, now you know how.

This week has been witness to the unfolding of a very interesting discussion about audio and video codecs on the Web. I have another post planned where I will weigh in on that debate, but before we get to that I want to clear something up.

I've read comments from a number of Mozilla contributors and the press where this discussion is being framed as pragmatism versus "core values" and I want to address that head-on.

A core Mozilla value is improving the Web experience for users.

Let me say that again. A core Mozilla value is improving the Web experience for users. We exist to ensure that human beings can shape their experience of the Web, that they are safe, secure, empowered -- in a word, sovereign.

Mozilla is a broad community of individuals with all kinds of values, many of them shared, and some not. Community-wide shared values include openness and transparency and participation; accountability and trust; interoperability and open source; and more. Mozilla has many values. But at the center of it all is putting human beings first.

This codec discussion is not about pragmatism versus values. It's about how we trade one value against another. When those kinds of trade offs becomes necessary, the core value of improving the Web experience for users cannot be ignored.

When I first got involved with Mozilla, back in 1998, Chris Blizzard was there, hacking on xlib and gtk. In those very early days of the project, (and having no idea his age,) I looked up to him as a grizzled Mozilla and open source veteran. When I joined the leadership team, staff@mozilla.org, in 2000, Chris was already an integral part of that group and helped me get my bearings and then courage to move beyond QA community building into larger and more challenging roles. Soon after, when Brendan created Mozilla's first project management team, drivers@mozilla.org, and invited me to be a part of it in 2001, Chris shared a founding seat and taught me much of what I know about making large software releases happen. In late 2007, Mozilla was fortunate enough to be able to finally hire Chris into a full-time role and not long after that, in 2008, Chris became the manager for the Tech Evangelism team, where I was working at that time. After a couple of years there, he moved over to the newly created Mozilla Product team to run Web Platform and I eventually followed him to the Product team to become the Director of Firefox Desktop. He and I have been working together there to make Firefox the best browser in the world for users and Web developers.

Blizzard is leaving Mozilla and heading to a start up. I'm thrilled for him and at the same time I'm tearful and sad because I know that I'm going to miss him greatly and often.

Chris, you've been a mentor, a partner, and a friend to me for 12 years. You helped me find my way at Mozilla, on more than one occasion, and I will be forever grateful. Good luck.

A former colleague of mine from IBM is now a senior executive at Samsung and offered to have them sponsor me in a visit to Korea, to talk about mobile Web browsers and Tizen. I thought it would be interesting, and it was.

The main part of my time there was Monday, when I spent nearly all day giving presentations of my thoughts on various aspects of Mozilla's mission and work:

• Mozilla's mission in the mobile Web era --- mostly the same as my talk in Sydney last year.
• Architectural overviews of various Mozilla products.
• Overview of our layer compositor framework.
• A discussion of 2D drawing APIs, and why we're doing Azure.
• Parallelism in Web browsers: what we're doing and what else could be done.
• A retrospective on XUL and browser extensions, and my thoughts on the future.
• Mozilla's work on open Web apps and app stores.
• Security models for open Web apps.
• BrowserID (borrowed from Francois Marier).
• Rust, Servo, the need for a new browser engine and the extreme risks of building one.

Samsung's campus in Suwon is quite fabulous and their people were very good to me.

However, the most interesting part of my trip was Tuesday. I got up before 6am and made my way to Seoul to pick up a tour of the North Korean border area. This tour stopped at Imjingak park first, then Infiltration Tunnel #3. This is a tunnel North Korea dug under the border, later revealed by a defector --- one of four found so far, but up to twenty are speculated to exist. It's made for short, non-claustrophobic people. Walking 500m hunched over is no fun, but the place is amazing.

After the tunnel we visited Dorasan Station, just outside the DMZ. It's a very impressive and almost entirely symbolic train station --- there's nothing around it, it symbolizes the desire to keep the train line running north into a unified Korea. A passionate desire for unification among many South Koreans was evident. Our tour guides spoke forcefully about Korea's troubled history in the 20th century and their desire to see a unified and independent Korea reemerge. (Our first guide was quite frank about the atrocities of the Japanese colonial period, which was a bit awkward since there were a lot of Japanese tourists on our bus.)

They had a North Korean refugee with the tour to talk first-hand about the horrors of life in the North. I've read some of the stories of refugees and defectors, and those stories make me sad and angry, but actually meeting a refugee was mostly humbling. This was a middle-aged woman who'd escaped across a frozen river on the Chinese border in the middle of winter, and then for two years worked her way to South Korea through China, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia, on the run from the authorities the whole time --- just a few years ago.

The best part of the tour was the Joint Security Area. That's the village right on the border where soldiers of both sides are stationed and where officials meet. There have been all kinds of crazy incidents there (check Wikipedia), and I find it incredible that they allow lots of tourists to visit it. You can stand close to the border and take pictures of the soldiers and buildings on the other side (but not the south side!). You can go right into the building where officials meet, where the border runs right through the table in the middle of the room, and even walk around the table to the North Korean side. (The North Koreans and South Koreans have a sort of protocol for taking exclusive access to the building for their tour groups.) While we were in there, there was a group of North Korean soldiers right outside the building windows, inexplicably taking photos of each other posing in front of the border. Towards the end some of them took photos of our group through the window, no more than an arm's length away.

There are all kinds of interesting facts associated with the DMZ and JSA, too many to go into here. I'll mention that the South Korean guards stationed at the JSA border are the best of the best --- must have a black belt in taekwondo or judo, university education, speak a foreign language, sufficiently handsome, sufficiently tall, parents not divorced, etc. While tour groups are present, they stand completely motionless and silent in carefully designed poses. Wearing dark sunglasses, in immaculate uniforms, they all look identical. Some people had their photos taken standing next to the guards in the meeting room (but not too close, we were repeatedly warned). It's surreal.

In fact the whole scene is surreal. I find it a little disturbing that the elite soldiers of perhaps the world's most repressive regime, and the contested border they guard, have been turned into a tourist attraction. I suppose we should hope it stays that way. At various points I prayed that before too long the border will be a relic, as is the Berlin Wall.

I got back to Seoul around a quarter past five, and learned something else about South Koreans: they work hard. Samsung had sent a car to take me back to their Suwon campus for a few more hours of meetings. It didn't bother me, since I wasn't going home to my family that night anyway, but a fair number of people were still working by 9pm, and I was told that most of them had arrived early that day. Impressive work ethic, and I suppose it's a partial explanation for South Korea's remarkable rise, but I think a bit unbalanced for healthy family life.

I really enjoyed my short visit. I found the country fascinating, and the people were very friendly and polite. I was surprised by the amount of English signage; even a little snack shop in Seoul had English I could point to to order. All the food was excellent --- now I finally have some idea of what real Korean food is like :-). I have to say though, that living there would not be attractive to me; the landscape is too relentlessly urban, and I cherish my New Zealand lifestyle.

I'm worried about the Internet. Not about the usual Mozilla stuff, although there's a lot of challenges there too. I'm worried that the Internet, the way we use it, is bad for people; bad for individuals, and bad for society.

One reason is security. We do not have the technology to build systems with strong behavioral guarantees; there are always bugs, and always exploitable bugs. The contest between attack and defense is vastly asymmetric; defenders must get everything right, attackers only need to find a few mistakes. Yet we keep bringing more of our world online. Even keeping systems away from the Internet becomes infeasible as mobile Internet-connected devices become increasingly pervasive.

Another reason is our brains. It seems obvious to me that the Internet is a lousy medium for human interaction (beyond people you already know well). There are lots of negative effects at work, and better-informed people than I have much to say about them. "Filter bubbles" are one concern. The accessibility of support groups for every kind of dysfunction (e.g. pro-anorexia or racist groups) is another. My biggest worry is the lack of empathy we experience when interacting with others online. The online comments of almost any major public Web site are toxic, especially on controversies. I've behaved badly online in ways that I never would have in "real life". In the incoming direction, the core Mozilla community is great, but random abuse and conflict from the Internet takes its toll. There's a lot more to be said about what's going wrong, but suffice it to say I'm an optimist about different kinds of people being able to get along in real life; I'm a decided pessimist about them getting along online.

(Even while I'm writing this, Christian Heilmann has posted about problems on Twitter.)

Let's not even talk about privacy and oppressive actors.

I'm fed up with techno-optimists who claim the march of progress is inevitably beneficial and we're just having some teething problems. Techno-optimists had big dreams for the Internet; that it would bring people together (see people yell at each other on Twitter), that bad information would be cured by more good information (see filter bubbles), that all knowledge would be universally available (OK, they got something right; thanks for Wikipedia). Not good enough.

So what should we do? For security, we need to increase the distance between important systems and the Internet. We need to steer towards technologies with provable properties (and somehow escape our dependence on C/C++ code). But that's weak sauce and I don't see our way clear. Human factors will let us down and there are hard limits on technology.

The human interaction problem is even tougher. Maybe we can find technical solutions to reengaging empathy. Providing voice and video interaction everywhere might help; WebRTC could save the world! (Probably not, but we'll try.) Individuals can opt to reduce their online presence and refocus on offline relationships. To some extent that's what I try to do, and in a low-key way I'm discouraging my kids from being online and engaged with computers (mainly by giving them more interesting alternatives).

What about the mass of humanity? Do we just keep accelerating and hope everything works out? Do we form a neo-Luddite action group and sabotage the Internet? Do we figure out some alternative approaches to using the Internet that limit the damage? I wish I knew.

When I'm traveling I try to avoid spending too much time moving from place to place. I want to spend enough time in each place I visit to get a feel for it. My goal for this trip was to get a bit of a feel for London, Paris, and rural villages in England and France. In England we chose Willersey in the Cotswolds, and in France we chose Lutzelbourg in Alsace (well, technically Lorraine).

It all went very well. We had only a few days of rain in more than three weeks, pretty good considering it was winter. It was good to alternate city with rural, because the days in the cities were hectic. In London I visited Imperial College for the ECOOP PC meeting, the Mozilla office, friends in Highgate, the Museum Of London, St Paul's, Westminster Abbey, the Monument, the Science Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Eye, and a lot more. In Paris, Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower, Versailles, the Mozilla office, and the Arc de Triomphe. In the Cotswolds we explored Oxford and took a day trip to Warwick Castle, and otherwise rambled around the countryside, visiting the villages for Broadway, Snowshill, Stanton, Saintbury and thereabouts. From Lutzelbourg we walked to Pharlsbourg and Saverne, and took a train trip to Strasbourg.

Like most of our holidays there was a lot of walking and eating, hopefully waistline-neutral. We tried to eat local, of course, although it's not clear what that means in London. Food at inns in the Cotswolds was very good. We had a particularly memorable lunch at the Mount Inn in Stanton, in the middle of a long loop walk from Snowshill past Buckland and back; we were a bit tired and grumpy and the lunch cured everything. The Alsatian food was quite Germanic, unsurprisingly, and enormous.

It was the first time I have encountered really old cathedrals. I recalled the passage in The Mythical Man-Month where Fred Brooks points out the incredible self-discipline and humility required for a hundred-year building project; what it takes for generations of artisans to submit to the vision of an architect long gone. Those qualities are inspiring.

We attended an evensong service at St Paul's. It was a nice touch that they had separate seating for tourists and worshipers.

We attended an Anglican service at the parish church in Willersey. It's a great old church, dating back over eight hundred years. The congregation was mostly ancient too, and the sermon I felt was weak, but the people were most welcoming. We went to a French Catholic service in Lutzelbourg, which had much better demographics and was very lively. I couldn't understand a word of it but my translator said the sermon was informed and Biblical. Oddly though, when the service was over everyone left immediately with no fellowship.

Even where the people of God aren't doing well, I find it invigorating to see what he's done and is doing in different places and throughout history. Sometimes when I travel I'm lazy and don't bother going to the local churches on Sundays; that's a big mistake.

A great thing about Lutzelbourg and the Saverne area is the number of ruined castles. We explored the Château de Lutzelbourg just a short walk from the village, and Greifenstein near the road and canal to Saverne. Greifenstein has been abandoned for over five hundred years and looks exactly like I imagined a ruined castle should.

I'd certainly like to spend more time in Europe, but it also made me appreciate what we have here in Auckland, and it's good to be back.