The "average user" is also not a real user. There aren't actual average users - they're a conceptual aggregate of a broad-range of users who may use entirely different sets of features, which share only a few common overlaps.

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.

However the workflow issues you break are sometimes something like this: http://xkcd.com/1172/ -- that may be a problem with software you paid $1 for 3 years ago and expected forever to work exactly as you need it.

Why shouldn't one expect to have one's purchased goods remain available indefinitely, no matter the price?

This comic is not meant to be a justification for removing actual features.

How did you mentally go from "expected forever to work exactly as you need it." to "Why shouldn't one expect to have one's purchased goods remain available indefinitely"?

There's a huge difference between being available and not ever changing. You're arguing against a point never made.

If I paid for a piece of software three years ago, I expect that piece of software that I obtained three years ago to work forever.

> 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.

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%.

Quantity of users is a really bad metrics.

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 ?

I think it's easy for early adopters to feel like developers owe us because we're the ones whose advocacy got them those 450mil users.

Advocacy is fine, but in the end it was the product itself that got the 450M users. You can't grassroots something that's not actually good.

Right, the developers and the early adopters deserve deference; I'm saying that it's easy for an early adopter to believe that the other 450mil users do not. After all, they're using it anyway despite it being friendly to the early adopters.

It doesn't mean the product was actually good, it simply means it lacked a better alternative.

If a product manages to be better than all the alternatives, it's hard to argue it's not a good product. At the very least it had to be better than "whatever everyone was using before" and "not using anything."

For the first few years, there were lots of sites that were designed for IE that broke in Firefox. Thus, at first, it was actually worse for many people. Yet, because the early adopters kept pushing it on everyone of their malware-ridden friends and relatives, it grew in usage anyway, allowing Mozilla to afford to make it better.

I was one of those folks who contributed to the Firefox announcement ads, but I don't really believe that it succeeded because folks pushed it rather than it simply being a better product. Yes, some sites at the time worked better in IE, but on the whole, the experience on Firefox was better and that's why folks supported it, not because they disliked Microsoft or something. (And yes, because we support proper web standards.)

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.

That's a really good way of putting it.

The number of times I've had to fix someone's "broken" browser because they accidentally pressed F11 is depressingly large.

The problem here is the lack of communication. How hard is it to show a brief popup telling the user what is happening and how to reverse it? At lot of applications with a fullscreen mode already do this. For example, Parallels and VMWare Workstation do it[1]. Options that can be confusing or dangerous should come with warnings instead of just taking them away.

[1]I think there is a way to stop showing the message, though.

Opera does it and offers an opera:config checkbox to turn the warning off.

Firefox is one the few who does not offer this feature.

Chrome does that when you hit F11.

in fact if you mouse to the top of the screen you can move away from full screen also