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Comment by sf_rob | Hacker News Reader

I think the about:config utility I want is something that keeps track of manually altered preferences. Ideally something like userChrome.css where I can simply override/extend behavior. This is probably already a thing, but it's a bit annoying to not know the origin of non-default prefs.

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You can set preferences with a user.js file in your profile directory. See for example: https://github.com/pyllyukko/user.js/blob/master/user.js

Once heard that once you setup your own user.js, Firefox will stop updating default settings, because they might override your settings. Over time that might cause you to not get new features enabled. Is this true?

I don't know, but wouldn't that apply to about:config settings in general?

Afaik it does.

I really like this route. Thanks!

> This is probably already a thing

On about:config to the right of the search bar at the top is a checkbox "Show only modified preferences".

This is well known but does not show manually modified preferences rather ANY modified preferences as the name implies. Even out of the box on a fresh install this results in pages of "modified preferences" that didn't even have a user initiated trigger.

This shows also shows preferences modified in indirect ways such as about:preferences, devtools, etc. Helpful to filter a list of potentially manually toggled prefs, but not a 1:1 filter.

Do you mean something like recording notes for _why_ a preference was changed in addition to the built-in tracking of which preferences have non-default default values?

There is no built in tracking of manual modifications and non-default values is a very different filter in this case.

The notes idea would be interesting though ideally the names of the key and values would be descriptive enough the reasoning for the change is obvious in 95%+ of cases (the other 5% being noting a bug workaround). As is the key names are usually pretty good but some of the opaque enum values could definitely use a note (or text based values instead) e.g. things like TRR mode being set to 2 vs 3 is always a google search.

> There is no built in tracking of manual modifications and non-default values is a very different filter in this case.

What are you looking for which the “show only modified preferences” button doesn't provide?

I'm going to pipe up here 'cause this has bothered me a lot too. $ grep user_pref prefs.js | wc -l 230

In this profile I have 230 modified preferences. I'm pretty sure scanning the list in "show only modified" that it is all of those. The vast majority were autoset by Firefox or Firefox extensions.

What I would love to find is prefs that I explicitly set manually in about:config. Those are the ones I realllly wanna find later if I messed something up. It would also be nice to have those explicitly set by a user action in Settings too.. Elsewhere contravariant mentioned "user.js" I'll look into that and it'll be super helpful on the desktop. Less so on Android where, thankfully, about:config is still accessible in the F-Droid Fennec firefox build (unfortunately they can't do anything about all my useful addons that were removed or removal of prior functionality but I'll take what I can get).

> What are you looking for which the “show only modified preferences” button doesn't provide?

Things handful of things I the user have actually set to be a certain value not the hundreds of things that are not the initial value the instant you launch the browser for the first time or the hundreds more that change from normal use after that. Just the 3 or 4 I have actually changed.

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