Uhh, Firefox does have the a proper GUI settings area. about:config is for experiments, internal flags automatically set according to the user's system configuration, or niche features not useful to most users (and so not promoted to a spot on one of the graphical panels).

With the "user.js" feature [0], you can actually control them from a flat configuration file.

[0] http://kb.mozillazine.org/User.js_file