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Comment by etatoby | Hacker News Reader

I think Firefox is a great example here.

It has a simple UI to guide the user into finding and setting the most common options. That UI must be as simple as possible for new users and can be changed regularly, according to the changing needs of the majority of users.

It also has an advanced, generic but type-safe UI (about:config) for finding and setting any possible option present in the software.

Configuration files are the traditional way to achieve this second level, but they don't always help the user in finding the options and are generally not type-safe.

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I think about:config is terrible. It's really hard to find anything in it. It's very "if you know its there you will use" but has no discoverability.

For instance I was wondering if I could have one tab connect over a VPN while the rest were over my normal connection. I have no idea if that's an options somewhere in the millions of toggles

EDIT: You know how applications used to be have an "Advanced" button that'd give you a nicely organized display off all the "extra" toggles? Whatever happened to that paradigm?

> You know how applications used to be have an "Advanced" button that'd give you a nicely organized display off all the "extra" toggles?

I think your example of about:config is also an explanation for why that went away. It used to be possible to reasonably put all of the more esoteric settings on a single page (or a small, single-digit, number of pages), but that's no longer the case for many pieces of software. Also realistically the overwhelming majority of users probably already weren't going into the advanced settings, and those that were are probably more capable of handing about:config.

At least there were options that were grouped in a sane fashion and discoverable while I was in a particular screen trying to grope around to find a setting that I needed to change. about:config is not discoverable in any way, shape, or form and we've lost the ability to discover capabilities that you don't look for in particular via a broader search. The ability to find something in passing that is related to your mission has severely diminished.

The problem with something like that is maintaining and testing all the possible settings.

I can't possibly fathom how firefox tests all of their settings. There's just no way. And that leads to edge cases and buggy software.

It isn't as big a problem as you might expect.

A very low percentage of users even change the advanced settings, so any issues which might exist have a very low impact.

If a user does hit a problem with some combination of settings, it is more likely they will report it with some useful reproduction information, since they are likely more of a power user than the average user.

Finally, anyone changing advanced settings is more likely to understand that they may break something and are less likely to be upset, when compared to something fundamental breaking for all users.

In fact, Firefox even warns you upon navigating to about:config that you could very well break something.

And chrome warns you too, but it doesn't stop the flood of help posts in the forums, on reddit, and other places when something is broken because of a setting that someone forgot they had enabled.

Just recently one of the updates for chrome broke the ability to interact with extensions if the user had enabled the flag "Material design in the browser's top chrome". There were tons of angry posts everywhere about how unusable chrome was because of that change, and how they should test their software better...

As for only "advanced users" knowing what happens in there, just do a web search for "chrome://flags" and look at any one of the hundreds of blog posts, news articles, and tutorials showing you how to go in and turn on these few flags that "make chrome better".

People compile binaries off of the internet and sudo make install them right over /usr. Go Google for all of those blog posts.

Evidence of the stupidity of the masses is not evidence that there is anything wrong with leaving advanced options behind a scary warning and letting people break things sometimes.

In fact, I'd wager that if you took away those advanced options, people would find some more dangerous way of achieving their goals, and there would probably be even more breakage and more blog spam complaints over the status quo.

Things are fine. The sky is not falling.

Well the chrome team is making that gamble, so I guess time will tell if it pays off!

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