Clutter is bad by definition:

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.

about:config is a great place for this kind of tweak. In fact, most of these check boxes the author talked about would fit in right at home in about:config.

Even more so if about:config included a one-liner explaining what the option is for. Sprinkle search/hierarchization on top of the about:config and suddenly the rule can be "if 99% of the users don't need the option, it goes into about:config only".

Sounds like opera:config - which doesn’t render the ‘Advanced’ tab in its Preferences menu useless.

The about:config window has a giant search box right at the top of it. It's not hierarchical, but its sorted alphabetically, so, for instance, all accessibility.* options are grouped together.

A short description would be nice, though.

    A short description would be nice, though.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/config-descri...

about:config is horrible because it's not hierarchically organized. A big fat list of items is much more difficult to use than multiple tabs or pages of related options with widgets appropriate to their data types. "Advanced" shouldn't automatically mean "difficult by design."

But how many people just browse the about:config window looking for settings to change? I go in there looking for a specific setting because I've searched google first, and found a website that explains what setting I need to change. Use the search bar and it filters the list for you.

You shouldn't have to search Google first. If you know what you want to do, the setting to do it should be discoverable through a well-crafted hierarchy of settings. Searchable configuration lists are a symptom of the UI designer outsourcing his or her job to the end user.

You're right. In a well designed program, the user should have to search Google. Like user sergiosgc said, a well-written one line explanation plus better organization would go far in improving the about:config screen.

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.

The reason I get worked up about discoverability in user interfaces is because that is how I learned nearly everything I know about computers up until I was in highschool. I was lightyears ahead of my parents, relatives, and most adults I came into contact with ever since I bought my parents' old IBM PC-XT for $75 when I was around eight years old. The only way I could keep learning was by exploring and discovering (and library books).

Have a look at opera:config.