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0 pointssaghm21d ago0 comments

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?

0 comments

lamontcg21d ago

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...

mmsc21d ago

> 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"

pavon21d ago

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.

godelski21d ago

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?)

chii21d ago

> 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).

washadjeffmad21d ago

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.

Maken21d ago

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.

Izkata21d ago

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

Something like that.

weaksauce21d ago

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.

Tempest198121d ago

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

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