Partisans of these platforms can argue all day about which is better. But the competitors have some things in common. Windows computers and Apple Macintoshes can both display the same photos and office documents, and play the same MP3 songs and YouTube videos. BlackBerrys and Treos can receive the same emails and call the same phone numbers.

It isn’t perfect. There are some files that don’t play well across platforms. But most common content does.

Yet there’s another technology competition that doesn’t share content well and offers few, if any, benefits to consumers. It’s the fight among two groups of technology companies and movie studios to sell a successor to the DVD. Each has developed a new type of disc that has the ability to show movies in high definition. To my eye, the pictures they deliver are identical.

Neither of these competing new discs, called Blu-ray and HD-DVD, works in current DVD players. They require very expensive new players, and the new players can’t handle both new disc formats, only one or the other.

Adding to the annoyance: Some movie studios release movies only in one of the two formats. Paramount and Warner Brothers support both formats, but Universal supports only HD-DVD, and Disney, Fox and Sony only Blu-ray.

So, in order to be sure you can play any movie released as a high-definition disc, you would have to replace your old DVD player with two new, much costlier players. It would be like having to buy separate TV sets to watch different networks’ programs.

Now, however, one gutsy company, LG Electronics, of Korea, a longtime member of the Blu-ray camp, has broken ranks and introduced a new combo player that can handle three formats: Blu-ray, HD-DVD, and regular old DVDs. It’s called the BH100 Super Multi Blue.

I’ve tested this combo player and found that it plays both new formats, as well as regular DVDs, just fine. But it’s more expensive than most single-format players and has some serious limitations when navigating through the menus on HD-DVD titles. For now, I can only recommend it for serious videophiles with deep pockets, but I’m hoping it’s the start of a trend that will end the foolish war.

The BH100 costs $1,200. That’s vastly more expensive than the newest DVD players, which, for less than $100, can take a regular DVD and “upscale” it so it looks better on a high-definition set. But that $1,200 isn’t so outrageous if you compare it with the price of buying two separate Blu-ray and HD-DVD players, which can reach or exceed $1,000 total. And the new LG takes up only one input on your TV, occupies less space on your component shelf and requires just one remote control.

I tested the LG combo player on my high-definition TV with this year’s Oscar-winning best picture, “The Departed,” and with “Superman Returns,” each of which is available in both of the new formats, as well as on DVD.

All played perfectly. The picture looked great in both formats and was noticeably better than an upscaled DVD image, which the LG unit also can produce. The LG outputs both new formats in a high, but grossly overhyped, resolution called “1080p.”

But the BH100 did a much better job with the Blu-ray discs than with the HD-DVD titles. That’s because while the combo player can play HD-DVD movies perfectly, it can’t display the HD-DVD discs’ menus for selecting scenes or accessing special features.

These menus usually offer the title and a photo to identify a scene, and the title and/or a description of the special feature. But on the LG BH100, the HD-DVD menus have no pictures, titles, or descriptions and look nothing like the original. They only identify scenes by number and duration. That makes it hard to find, say, the deleted scenes from “The Departed,” or the documentaries on the Superman disc.

The BH100 was based on a Blu-ray-only player and lacks the special chips HD-DVD players use to display the menus properly. LG had to concoct its own rudimentary replacements for those menus. The company says a future combo model could include the chips and thus display the HD-DVD menus as well as it does the Blu-ray menus, but it hasn’t decided whether to make such a product.

One reason for that decision may be the competing approach to solving the stupid disc war. Warner Brothers is working on a combo disc, instead of a combo player. This disc would hold both the Blu-ray and HD-DVD versions of a movie, so you could pop it into whichever type of player you own.

Until the electronics and movie companies support universal high-definition players and/or universal high-definition discs, I don’t recommend that most people invest in either technology. Why prolong a war that’s bad for consumers?

Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. See video versions of my reviews at wsj.com/mossbergvideo.

These technologies allow users to create highly personalized pages filled with just the information or tools they desire. If you’re interested in the car industry and college basketball, live in Toronto, love to view family photos and often use a calculator, you can fill your computer screen with small modules that display relevant information and necessary tools for all these interests. You won’t have to browse through the Web or launch a bunch of large programs.

These modules and miniapplications appear as small square or rectangular objects, with the content or functionality inside. You can arrange them as you like.

There are two broad categories of these personalized pages — those that appear as Web pages, and thus require you to be online to use them, and those that are on your local desktop. The latter don’t require an Internet connection, though some of their modules may work only if you’re online.

On the Web, the most familiar of these modular systems is My Yahoo, which allows you to combine page segments featuring Yahoo’s own news and information with segments containing syndicated feeds of headlines from other sites, often called RSS feeds. Others have launched similar pages. One longstanding competitor is Microsoft’s my.msn.com.

On the desktop, the best known miniapplication system is Apple’s Dashboard, which allows Macintosh users to install tiny programs called Widgets that perform searches, display photo slide shows, track stocks, play music, and more. Microsoft’s new Windows Vista operating system, out this week, has a comparable system called Sidebar.

Now, there’s a new free Web site that combines some of the best features of My Yahoo and Dashboard. It’s called Netvibes, it’s available at Netvibes.com, and it’s unusual because it’s from Paris, France — not Silicon Valley or Seattle.

Like My Yahoo’s system for displaying feeds from non-Yahoo sources, Netvibes allows you to fill your personal page with headlines from all over the Web. And like Apple’s Widgets, Netvibes’ modules are produced by a wide variety of users, who upload them and make them available free.

I’ve been a My Yahoo user for many years, mostly because it allows me to see a lot of information at a glance, and it’s mainly plain text so it loads fast. I also use Apple’s Widgets on my Macintosh machines. But I find myself using Netvibes more and more lately.

Netvibes isn’t the only new Web player in the personalized Web page space. A new entry called Pageflakes, run by an ex-Yahoo executive, promises a graphically richer approach than Netvibes that the company claims is easier for novices to customize. It’s at pageflakes.com.

And Yahoo is in the process of revamping My Yahoo to update its look and features. The details of the new design aren’t public yet.

Like My Yahoo, Netvibes is text-heavy and loads quickly. But depending on which module you use, it can have color and graphics.

A menu down the left-hand side of the screen lets you quickly add modules to Netvibes. Popular ones are listed in this menu, and you can browse or search for others by clicking a link called “Get more modules.” You can add feeds — headlines from regular Web sites that support them — by clicking “Add a feed.”

Among the modules you can add to your Netvibes page right from this menu, without navigating to any setup page, are weather forecasts, a notepad, a to-do list and calendar, and modules that perform searches for Web pages, blogs, pictures, videos and podcasts.

There are also email modules that will display your new messages from Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, AOL Mail or any regular old email account you configure. Others display content from eBay, MySpace, Fox Sports and more.

To add an unlisted feed, you just navigate to a Web page that offers feeds and copy the Web address into Netvibes’ ”Add a feed” feature. Or you can place a button on the toolbar in the Firefox Web browser that will add a new feed with one click.

On my Netvibes page, I have modules that show the weather, my latest emails, the most popular stories from the Journal’s Web site, and top headlines from various technology and sports Web sites. I have colorful modules displaying photos from Flickr and other photo sites, and modules for video searches.

One nice feature of Netvibes is that you can set up automatically updated searches for terms that may appear in blogs all over the Web. For instance, you could create a module that will constantly show any new blog entries featuring, say, “Microsoft Vista” or “Apple iPhone.”

There are some downsides to Netvibes. Some of its modules seem aimed at techies, not mainstream users, and others are in French, though a version customized for American users is in the works.

But Netvibes — and competitors like Pageflakes — will give My Yahoo a run for its money. They provide an easy way to cut through the clutter of information that confronts us all.

• Email me at mossberg@wsj.com.