Most of the time, the major content of a page doesn't require it. When it does, it is usually either poor design, or good design where the design is intended to display a bunch of crap I don't want and download a hoard of tracking data.
To put it another way, when I'm surfing, Google Analytics isn't doing anything in my interest.
Increased software complexity and no tangible benefit. Lose-Lose.
If that is true, then point me to all those complaints.
There is no legitimate reason your average user should have access to this checkbox.
That's called kicking away the ladder, and fuck that with a rusty chainsaw. How are people supposed to even get curious about what Javascript is, when they never hear of it?
There are a million ways to display and to drill down into options that would make the FF options less cluttered, more logical, while having even more options than it does. There are ways to inform users pretty much exhaustively via built-in tooltips and documentation -- all of this has been working great in the 90s and got better since then. Icon > Title/Tooltip > Short Description > Verbose Description, so you learn everything you "stumble over" once when you need it, and from then on just use it, with the option to refresh your knowledge anytime.
Just compare about:config in Opera and Firefox, and simply accept we're dealing with different levels of skill and taste here, not just different choices.
http://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-users-read-on-the-web/ http://uxmyths.com/post/647473628/myth-people-read-on-the-we... http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/10/treating-user-myopi...
Agreed. However, the web consists of far more than just "articles", and quite a bit of content legitimately uses JavaScript for required functionality. Disabling it needs to have the kinds of huge "this will break things" warnings associated with installing an extension like NoScript; it shouldn't have a checkbox in Firefox's preferences.