Yes. But also, lay users are not nearly as dumb/incompetent as UX designers allege when they rationalize removing features to "simplify things."

Not a UX designer, but having supported systems for decades I don't agree with your statement. If you got the system down to a single button that said 'Do' the user would still somehow screw it up.

It's simple, when you really think about it. Just remove the user. All such pebkac and id-10t errors immediately resolved.

>Just remove the user.

Clawbot: I understand what you need, drones dispatched.

And the correct response to this knowledge is to not try to optimize for the user that will screw anything up.

This only depends on how much money they have. If dumb users pay the most, then businesses will optimize for them.

Have worked on a help desk. Dialog boxes are close to this UI and nobody read them, come to think of it power users don't tend to either.

Honestly, "go into about:config and flip some switches to remove stuff" is about as easy as I could imagine for allowing people to customize it. What would you suggest?

Yeah, if you turn it all into buttons and settings in the actual settings menus, someone else is going to post a long rant about how the settings menus have a million confusing options that nobody uses...

Mine also isn't anywhere nearly as confusing as his by default, so this smells like a power-user-has-power-user-problems-and-solutions rant...

They intentionally made the menu longer to look worse by selecting some text first. So it is showing four sets of contextual actions: For the Link, the Image, the Selection, and the Page.

Also a few of the menu items are new since the latest ESR (the AI stuff in particular), so you won't see them if you are running v140.

> Mine also isn't anywhere nearly as confusing as his by default

You can run the following and try it for yourself. Don't forget to highlight some text before right-clicking an image (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Factbook)

  TMPPROF="$(mktemp -d /tmp/ff-tmp.XXXXXX)"
  /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -no-remote -profile "$TMPPROF"

I'd suggest that they make it clearer what the user actually changed, in about:config, and show the defaults. If I click that button "Show only modified settings" I see a lot of things, mostly options that I set from the normal settings. I mean "browser.download.lastDir" should be in practically everyone's.

So there's a lot of noise and resetting things can be unclear. Especially given that when you reinstall things not all uninstalls clear out settings. It could definitely help if the about:config page tells you about the user.js file and directs you to more information. Why doesn't editing things in about:config generate the user.js file? Maybe tell people about prefer.js and where it exists?

The other thing I'd suggest, documentation. Like what is "browser.translations.chaos.errors"? There's a million things like that that are hard to learn about and explore. In an ideal system there would be a wiki with every option documented and when hovering over the option you'd get a short explanation and a click is a link to the documentation. But that's also a big undertaking (if you're building a new browser, would be nice to do this from the get go!)

I don't think there's a perfect solution and certainly these things are not easy to implement, but if you're asking how it could be easier for the user, then yeah, I think these things would be major improvements and help prevent the blindly following of random blog posts and copy pasting of things like betterfox (I'm sure it is, but how do I know?)

> In an ideal system there would be a wiki with every option documented and when hovering over the option you'd get a short explanation and a click is a link to the documentation.

doesn't even need to be a wiki, because programs should contain their own help files! Like how commandline programs are encouraged (by command arg parsing libraries) to include the documentation in the very code that parses it.

Whoever that added those config option should also document it, preferably right in the code so that automatic generation of docs for the UI is possible (and ensures that it matches the version you're using).

I blame mobile, always, but it seems like software makers have become resistant (if not adversarial) to designing for PC, and also for users.

While adding tooltips or references to about:config could be a community project, I anticipate friction based on nothing more than than the seeming reluctance to implement community feedback over internal or consortium interests.

there is a middle ground where you could do something like about:mouse (about:keyboard for keyboard shortcuts already exists) for the power users. doesn't need to be fancy but it would be easy enough to do.

Have you ever right-clicked on the toolbar and chosen "Customize Toolbar..." ?

Something like that.

The toolbar has a "Customize toolbar" GUI screen that lets you add, remove and reorder elements. Maybe something similar could be done for context menus, including new entries added by extensions.

Measure usage, and dim the unused menu items over time... or bold the ones the user selects the most.

Mozilla should really try taking their extension ecosystem seriously, and deliver features like the AI chatbot integration as first-party extensions that come pre-installed but can be easily managed by users with a much better UI than about:config.

And then people would complain about Firefox being bloated with all these built-in extensions. And then if you don't pre-install them people will complain about needing to add all of these extra extensions.

Indeed, and this argument ("it will be too bloated") is often used by developers themselves to avoid (or hide) advanced features. I never quite understood it. Just put all the mysterious flags behind an "Advanced" menu, which normie users will know not to touch.

There would still be decidedly fewer complaints, because extensions are vastly easier to manage and disable or remove than this long list of about:config settings. The fact that you cannot satisfy everybody simultaneously cannot be an excuse for failing to ship with sensible defaults and easy, discoverable customization.

They right clicked on an image which is also a clickable link which adds the additional options for both links and images, a total of 11, to the defaults.

Kinda, but if something can be built as an extension, it probably should be. It proves what you can do with the APIs, proves it can be replaced / forked by other people, and ensures a consistent level of isolation by default.

And if it can't... often it's worth asking if it should be possible.

Apparently they've recently added a first party side bar for LLM integration, but I haven't tried it out yet.

Yes, that's one of the things that really should have been an extension. Tree Style Tab works alright as an extension-provided sidebar.

Putting the chat or sidebar in the core of the browser sounds very much like something done by a developer who wasn't around for Mozilla prior to Firefox, and isn't aware of the original goal of being the antithesis of the browser that included everything and the kitchen sink.