Firefox really does have an easily-reached config panel with "Use SSL 3.0" and "Use TLS 1.0" on it. What is the situation in which any user at your lab would know which of those options is sensible? Neither of them are the current version of TLS. Both of them have cryptographic flaws. And both are extremely widespread.
Firefox really does have a top-level config panel with a checkbox that disables automatic image loading. It's not even an "advanced" option.
I don't think your comment really engages with the article. What should the top-level options for a browser be?
And in several places he explicitly says that these killed options (whether they're currently in the advanced panel or not) should be replaced by add-ons, not by an advanced option or even by about:config.
So I don't think I dragged the article to a conclusion it didn't try to make. The article is clearly about killing options which I contend people need, and I think should be placed in an advanced section rather than killed.
Can you defend the SSL 3.0 and TLS 1.0 checkboxes?
Certificate manager in an addon? What?!
And yes, they are so bad to the point they are harmful, but the only reason they are in there is because Firefox has it's own certificate store, more of a portability quirk than anything.
His point was, and I agree with it, that a mass browser does not need to expose cert management in a way that the 99.9% can access it because it's likely to cause more harm than good for anyone who is not capable of jumping through a few extra hoops to get to it.
Like removing the certificates manager. Or cache control. Or the ability to restrict cookies. Or JavaScript. Or the ability to turn off menubars, should you so desire to do so (kiosk mode). All of these things are used by people. Just because he doesn't like it, doesn't mean others don't want it.
"The people that need to do these things should use add-ons, or at the very least an about:config tweak."
UI designers are empowered, and "power" technical and business users suffer for it. My iPad is easy for my two-year old to use... But it is horrific for more many types of tasks that computer users do every day.
Firefox definitely carries a lot of config legacy... But going too far the other way is dangerous too.
That sounds to me like it should be moved into an add-on. The users affected still can get the capability while the rest of the world is spared another setting that clutters the UI.
If you remove options from your product that are vitally important to even a small number of users your product can no longer "be used by anyone."
Users with images turned off by someone else wouldn't be confused if there was a yellow stripe across the top of the screen with a "you're viewing this website with images turned off [turn images on]" type message. Same goes for a "this page may display better with javascript enabled. [turn javascript on] if you trust this site" message for those browsing with javascript turned off.
Similarly, as the original post points out, the big issue with SSL is that you get a scary (and inaccurate and incomplete) message telling them to email the website owners because their site is broken, and not a simple message they'll need to "click here to turn SSL secure access back on" to view the web page.
If the developers/designers of Firefox don't have a reasonably answer as to why a large enough amount of users would disable these settings, then they should be removed (or to avoid upsetting existing power user moved to about:config).
If I recall, there are some Chrome options that you can't modify from Chrome itself, but which you can configure using Group Policy Objects. That (or whatever the equivalent is on *nix--files in /etc?) should be where the settings for "lab admins" go.
User interface development for mainstream software is invariably a balance between presenting something accessible to novice/occasional users and presenting something powerful to expert/frequent users. You can go a long way to helping both groups with a thoughtful design, but there's always going to be someone who wants something slightly (or completely) different.
For mainstream software, trying to please everyone all the time is a fool's game. That's what bespoke development is for.
Same argument can be said for removing a feature 2% of the population of users rely on. 2% of 450 million users is 9 million users. Not what I'd call a tiny number of users.
The geekier side of the affected users may find the add-on, sure. But they're not the only ones affected.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/clutter
In UIs, it imposes cognitive load for little or no benefit.
I'm immensely grateful that I did some tech support in college. It taught me how much seemingly trivial, ignorable UI clutter caused real problems for people who aren't programmers. That is, the vast bulk of the population. Cognitive loads that are small for me can be giant for others. Letting me design a UI based on my own preferences is like letting NBA basketball players decide how to organize my kitchen cupboards.
A short description would be nice, though.
A short description would be nice, though.
And you're right that just because something is deep in advanced settings doesn't mean that the design has to be shit. But in this case, and in other browsers, 99.99% of users don't even know it exists, so Mozilla likely feels justified in leaving it as is.
It's not spam to discuss the merits of implementing a feature request.
> instead, go file a bug saying that Firefox should check the user's quota in addition to statfs. Easily added, and then Firefox becomes that much more automatic.
Not possible - the quota information is not made available in any standard way, but rather by a non-standard dot file in the user's home directory. I know the quota information should be exported by rquotad but things aren't always that neat in the real world.
Even if it were possible users may still prefer not to sacrifice any of their quota-limited home directory to Firefox cache. Who's Mozilla to presume they know what users want?
First of all, note that the tracking bug you linked to doesn't even track or discuss any bug about removing the cache options, making it pointless to bring up there.
It wouldn't be spam for you file a bug requesting a fix for quota handling. It also wouldn't be spam for you to post a note to the bug about removing the cache options to point at the quota bug, and to make sure it'll stick around as an about:config option. However, canvassing for other people to go post to a bugzilla tracking bug just leads to noise like the current pile of comments in bug 851698; the vast majority of the comments in that bug, especially the ones by users labeled "(New to Bugzilla)", do indeed constitute spam, and those same comments show up in just about every bug trying to clean up the UI.
See also https://www.xkcd.com/1172/ .
> Not possible - the quota information is not made available in any standard way, but rather by a non-standard dot file in the user's home directory. I know the quota information should be exported by rquotad but things aren't always that neat in the real world.
So, we've started from "bug only seen by people running Firefox over NFS", already a very small fraction of users, and then shrunk the audience further to people who don't even use the standard quota mechanisms. An option to serve that vanishingly small fraction of users seems like precisely the domain of about:config.
> Even if it were possible users may still prefer not to sacrifice any of their quota-limited home directory to Firefox cache.
And those users can go tweak the setting in about:config, or you could tweak it for them by changing the system-wide default. That doesn't make it appropriate to put in the main configuration UI; not enough people use it, and its very existence in the UI hurts more people than it helps.
> Who's Mozilla to presume they know what users want?
Makers of a browser used by hundreds of millions of users, with extensive data from actual user testing, tons of statistical data telling them which settings and UI options people actually touch, and most importantly an understanding that just because an option has users doesn't mean it should continue to exist, and that the noisiest people on Bugzilla frequently don't represent a significant fraction of users.
about:config exists to satisfy use cases like yours. Tone down the rhetoric and understand that when your software has hundreds of millions of users, every single change represents a tradeoff between who it might help and who it might hurt. This one seems far easier than most.
You're arguing for the same thing.
Edit: and the about:config page shows a giant warning that "This might void your warranty" before allowing you to proceed. It's pretty different from a generic "Advanced" tab in a preferences window.
The developer and designers of the product.
They might not always be right, but they need to be able to make decisions for users in order to move forward. Apps need a champion to lead them and guide them, and sometimes even to upset some users to improve the product for other users.
The OP seems to think about the average user and decides that a lot of stuff is not needed in Firefox options. But the average user does NOT click on Advances Options in any case. To be fare, the average user do not click on Preferences at all.
Is not bad idea to have some of this options as plugins, though. But we must remember that if the "average user" clicks on "Full screen" button (or even worse, F11), he/she'll probably have to reboot the computer in order to "fix" de computer.
You can not damage the "average user" at all, but manage to break the workflow of most of your real users but eliminating parts of the set of features they depend on.
i.e. remove 100 different features only used by 1% of your users, and it's actually quite likely you've removed features 100% of your users use.
This comic is not meant to be a justification for removing actual features.
There's a huge difference between being available and not ever changing. You're arguing against a point never made.
Perhaps true, but your estimates are off by many orders of magnitude. Wikipedia puts the Firefox userbase at 450 million. How many people do you think need to turn off SSL? Hundreds? Thousands? That's about 0.0002%. How many need to turn off or manually tweak the size of disk cache? Over 9000? That's still only 0.002%. And oddly enough, it'll overlap heavily with the last 0.002%, and the next 0.002%.
People really disliked being treated as numbers, they'd rather be treated as human beings.
It gives the impression that it's about finding a justification to an arbitrary already made decision.
IMHO a more sensible way to tackle the issue is to make usage cases and find a way to address what ever arise from this scenario wisely. From the nfs case exposed earlier, a "I'm on nfs with quota" checkbox would make more sense than forcing cache manually to 0.
Instead of removing features and hiding options, wouldn't it be preferable to provide options that make sense and make them usable ?
Firefox was a spinoff of Mozilla and was a pretty good browser from v1, and within a year of release was considered the best browser available.
[1]I think there is a way to stop showing the message, though.
Firefox is one the few who does not offer this feature.
> Before moving forward with this suggestion, please do a usage analysis for each of these options (or any future suggested options) based on regions in the world. Several of these options (images - which doesn't break Google for me, javascript, cache) are all things that appear on the surface to be very useful in third world countries where bandwidth & hardware is very limited. The ease of finding and configuring these options might be precisely why Firefox has a healthy lead over competing browser in Africa. So while the overall percent of users is 2%, this number possibly shoots up to a majority of the user base when looking at specific regions or demographics.
Specifically, image & javascript would help with bandwidth. Cache override/disable would be useful on devices like the Raspberry Pi that run off of flash media (or for use cases like running Firefox off a flash drive ala PortableApps); the type of hardware I would expect to be more widely used in 3rd world countries.
That being said, making the algorithms smarter should probably help, e.g. only caching in memory if there is an SSD and just store frequently-used sites' resources on disk which might be a viable compromise.
In this instance I have to wonder if FireFox couldn't look for a quota - it can be detected.
No. Here's a case where Firefox will definitely not do a better job: an NFS-based computer lab environment where users have individual quotas - the statfs() syscall (i.e. what the `df` command uses) returns you the amount of disk space available to everyone, which is enormous. Firefox then attempts to use that space, and quickly exhausts the user's quota. This is a real-life scenario and the current solution among users is to set the cache size to 0 - the Internet connection is damn fast anyways and they'd rather use their space to store actual files.
For the love of god, what is wrong with having an Advanced options panel? The author's stated goal is "to design software that can be used by everyone " but when you remove options like this, you make your product not usable by some people unless they do additional research to find the hidden about:config option or install some add-on.
The bug for this is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=851698 - if you think this is a bad idea I encourage you to leave a comment there (but be nice). Mozilla may otherwise not realize that this is such a bad, unpopular idea.