Yeah because those who are aware how those things work can totally waste their time downloading addons to do basic things.

Common sense: you don't know what this control is for? DON'T touch it. Or touch it and face the consequences (learning's got to start somewhere, right?).

This article seems to encourage apple's way of thinking ('simple', 'just works') and this is one of the main reasons for me (and many other people, I reckon) to ignore all their products completely. You want to go this way? fine. Don't expect anyone technically-literate to use your thingie though (because it becomes harder to use for debugging and all those things than, say, Chrome). Also:

> Is it really worth having a preference panel that benefits fewer than 2% of users overall?

and then

> Even 1% of a few hundred million isn’t a trivial number of people.

Decide on it already :)

I really don't understand how it is a problem, these options are surely useful for a portion of the userbase otherwise they would not be displayed. I'm pretty sure people browsing with a 33k modem connection would enjoy disabling images so everything could be faster and you can find examples for any item of this list.

All these options are under the configuration menu anyway so no inexperienced user are not going to go in this menu anyway... I don't really see the point this article is trying to make.

"That’s right, you can’t even see the text box you’re supposed to type your search into. Congratulations, we just broke the Internet."

No, Google broke the Internet. If they've introduced a dependency between text boxes and images (?!), that's down to them. Web interface should work via progressive enhancement such that it's perfectly possible to browse and use a site without javascript, css, or even images.

Google is forcing its browser, Apple has its own, and Microsoft has one as well. I don't see "regular users" using Firefox unless it is recommended to them by the "2%". So don't annoy the 2%.

My problem with the argument of moving everything into an addon is that I don't care for installing 13 addons with no permissions list (in firefox at least) and no way to keep them away from my browsing activity.

Can anyone explain to me the problem? They basically created an OPTION, i.e., optional, that breaks when people who don't get it use it.

Now I've got plenty of tech illiterate friends, and they've asked me many questions over the years, but never did it have anything to do with browser settings not loading pictures or javascript.

In fact, it's the one thing people tend not to mess with. They'll do tons of weird software, they'll even do regedits from a misinformed guide, but touching browser settings? I don't know about you, but none of my friends ever did.

So what's the problem here? Don't see one. What's the solution if there was a problem? Create a 'dev-mode' button, give the user a warning they shouldn't use it unless they're software developers, and put your tricky settings behind that wall.

The solution doesn't seem to me to require people to install add-ons for what is basic functionality to a decent amount of people, especially not in an addon store with lots of third-party crap that might work now, but doesn't work in combo with another add-on, or stops working after the browser updates and the add-on dev moved on to other things.

So how many of these things have been changed since the article was published 1,5 years ago?

After looking through my settings, more or less all of them, with the exception of cache management, it seems.

This is from 2013. Previous comments on this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5394494

In the case of Hipmunk and other javascript-required sites, I would say that's their problem, not the browser. Obviously, Hipmunk made a choice, and that's well within their rights, to not deal with browsers that don't have JS enabled. I've done the same thing.

But never once did I, or would I, blame the user.

These are just the decisions we have to make to get things done some days.

Firefox can even break itself. If you deselect "View -> Toolbars -> Menu Bar" with the menu bar then the menu bar disappears. How do you get it back? You can't repeat the same procedure because the menu bar is not there any more!

It turns out you can right-click on an empty space on the tab bar to reenable the menu bar, but this is far from obvious.

I find it amusing that one of his examples is disabling SSL 3.0.

Personally I hate when they hide or turn off entirely every possible option. They are there for a reason if someone wants to use them - if not - simply don't use them. After such options have disappeared peoples that were using it are pissed and those who have not - don't even notice.

Wait, what he's saying is that it's not obvious that View -> Toolbars -> Navigation Toolbar toggles the visibility of the navigation toolbar? I still have nothing but pure distaste for the current "I can look like Chrome, too!" UI decision of Firefox, and I'm just going to get more peeved as they kill off more features for pure stylistic sake.

So in the future I'll have to browse through another 6 dozen 'classic options' add-ons until I find one that is maintained, compatible, does what it claims, and hopefully doesn't break my privacy?

Sounds great that the company that puts "Your Privacy First" finds that untrusted third parties are the best providers of core functionality that should have been in the browser to begin with.

The thing that so many of the usability challenged folks in this thread are missing is that this is an argument about checkboxes in the standard application preferences.

For complicated products like Firefox, there can be a range of options based on how in your face they are:

  1. wizard that demands a decision when you first install the app (last resort)
  2. main pane of preferences (common decisions)
  3. about:config (obscure use-cases, dangerous use cases)
  4. only within the dev-tools (common case for a specific group of people)
  5. recompiling (the other last resort)

Seems a nerve was struck with this one over the time since this was originally posted.

Most of the options he's complaining about are not easily changed in my current Windows version of Firefox.

Only the certificates (which is a multi-click process to get to) and the cache management are located as described.

Although, looking around I found an option I never bothered to notice before. View -> Page Style seems to provide the ability to disable all CSS quite easily. What purpose does that serve for an everyday user?

Except most of those checkboxes don't exist anymore, the encryption tab is gone, etc. (http://imgur.com/YX4KyQL)

If Firefox would just add DOCUMENTATION (text and perhaps a URL to more text) to the options in the about:config page, many aspects of using it would improve enormously.

This is related to a question I was just pondering. I'm developing a web application that relies heavily on JavaScript for a lot of the interactivity. I was planning on devoting a decent amount of time to implementing JavaScript disabled functionality as well, but realized for my target market (small to medium business), that might not be very important, and could just be a big time waste. Anyone have any experience/insight?

Well, how about the option that per default DOES NOT ALLOW FIREFOX TO AUTOMATICALLY SWITCH BETWEEN ONLINE AND OFFLINE MODE!

Instead you have to explicitly hit Work Offline to get into offline mode. That's totally bad for a modern application that can work both offline and online.

I like Firefox with options - better yet Firefox + noscript.

If your website needs with js, flash and need to load js plugins from 10 other ad domains to see, that's fine. I don't want to see it anyway.

I love to have choices.

The "load images" argument uses images from an alternate domain that is blocked where I am (porn hosting) ... so I can't see his screenshots arguing for not allowing images to show ... oh, the irony.

In that rather technical article, I was glad to see that the author thinks readers need help (in the form of a hover tooltip) that explains the "&" symbol. It means "and"! Who knew?!