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Comment by krschultz | Hacker News Reader

The setting is vitally important for an extremely small number of people.

That sounds to me like it should be moved into an add-on. The users affected still can get the capability while the rest of the world is spared another setting that clutters the UI.

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What's wrong with clutter in an advanced tab? The only clutter exposed to the "rest of the world" is a tab that says "advanced" which is not really clutter at all.

If you remove options from your product that are vitally important to even a small number of users your product can no longer "be used by anyone."

Isn't the logical conclusion of this kind of reasoning that everyone should become a programmer and browsers should be supplied in source form only, so everyone can customise any tiny detail they want to? That's not exactly a realistic prospect for most non-geeks.

User interface development for mainstream software is invariably a balance between presenting something accessible to novice/occasional users and presenting something powerful to expert/frequent users. You can go a long way to helping both groups with a thoughtful design, but there's always going to be someone who wants something slightly (or completely) different.

For mainstream software, trying to please everyone all the time is a fool's game. That's what bespoke development is for.

No. It's just a matter of having advanced options or not. Each level of customization should be progressively more hidden but more powerful.

But where do you draw the line? What constitutes an "advanced option" worthy of dedicated UI rather than a customised build? What proportion or minimum number of users have to find it valuable for the effort and lost simplicity to be justified? When there are too many advanced options to manage sensibly, do we move to "advanced", "really advanced" and "actually quite scary you even thought of this" options?

Love to know how numbers of users affected is measured. One of the arguments is that with a large enough number of users (millions) an option can cause significant numbers of people grief if they misuse it.

Same argument can be said for removing a feature 2% of the population of users rely on. 2% of 450 million users is 9 million users. Not what I'd call a tiny number of users.

One problem is that browser vendors don't do a good job of sorting features into "Advanced" tabs and "important" options, so that some options that would be valuable to lots of people are buried alongside options that are valuable mostly to lab admins.

> options that are valuable mostly to lab admins

If I recall, there are some Chrome options that you can't modify from Chrome itself, but which you can configure using Group Policy Objects. That (or whatever the equivalent is on *nix--files in /etc?) should be where the settings for "lab admins" go.

The problem here isn't that the unusual options exist in a hidden away tab. The problem is that the options to revert to the defaults are in the same hidden away tab.

Users with images turned off by someone else wouldn't be confused if there was a yellow stripe across the top of the screen with a "you're viewing this website with images turned off [turn images on]" type message. Same goes for a "this page may display better with javascript enabled. [turn javascript on] if you trust this site" message for those browsing with javascript turned off.

Similarly, as the original post points out, the big issue with SSL is that you get a scary (and inaccurate and incomplete) message telling them to email the website owners because their site is broken, and not a simple message they'll need to "click here to turn SSL secure access back on" to view the web page.

This is easily the most sensible solution I've seen proposed here so far. Make it easy to fix broken stuff, rather than hard to break stuff.

But for a user that legitimately wants to turn off images or javascript (why?), they won't want to see that message on every page. If the message only shows once then the problem the message was trying to avoid returns. If the message shows on every page legitimate users of the option are inconvenienced. Of course you could create yet another setting saying "Warn when I have obscure settings enabled"...

If the developers/designers of Firefox don't have a reasonably answer as to why a large enough amount of users would disable these settings, then they should be removed (or to avoid upsetting existing power user moved to about:config).

I'll claim it's more likely users affected will not see any way to prevent it, not find the add-on, write off Firefox as bloated, and use something else.

The geekier side of the affected users may find the add-on, sure. But they're not the only ones affected.

Small number of people overall does not take into account where those users are concentrated. A lot of the options he uses as examples are extremely useful in third world countries where Firefox actually dominates the competition precisely because of how easy it is to configure it to be a low bandwidth browser. Africa probably being the best example of where Firefox dominates. So while it may be 2% overall, it could be something huge like 50% of the userbase in specific demographics/regions.

2% of 450 million users is 9 million users.

Clutter is not bad in and of itself.

about:config is a great place for this kind of tweak. In fact, most of these check boxes the author talked about would fit in right at home in about:config.

Even more so if about:config included a one-liner explaining what the option is for. Sprinkle search/hierarchization on top of the about:config and suddenly the rule can be "if 99% of the users don't need the option, it goes into about:config only".

Sounds like opera:config - which doesn’t render the ‘Advanced’ tab in its Preferences menu useless.

The about:config window has a giant search box right at the top of it. It's not hierarchical, but its sorted alphabetically, so, for instance, all accessibility.* options are grouped together.

A short description would be nice, though.

    A short description would be nice, though.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/config-descri...

about:config is horrible because it's not hierarchically organized. A big fat list of items is much more difficult to use than multiple tabs or pages of related options with widgets appropriate to their data types. "Advanced" shouldn't automatically mean "difficult by design."

But how many people just browse the about:config window looking for settings to change? I go in there looking for a specific setting because I've searched google first, and found a website that explains what setting I need to change. Use the search bar and it filters the list for you.

You shouldn't have to search Google first. If you know what you want to do, the setting to do it should be discoverable through a well-crafted hierarchy of settings. Searchable configuration lists are a symptom of the UI designer outsourcing his or her job to the end user.

You're right. In a well designed program, the user should have to search Google. Like user sergiosgc said, a well-written one line explanation plus better organization would go far in improving the about:config screen.

And you're right that just because something is deep in advanced settings doesn't mean that the design has to be shit. But in this case, and in other browsers, 99.99% of users don't even know it exists, so Mozilla likely feels justified in leaving it as is.

The reason I get worked up about discoverability in user interfaces is because that is how I learned nearly everything I know about computers up until I was in highschool. I was lightyears ahead of my parents, relatives, and most adults I came into contact with ever since I bought my parents' old IBM PC-XT for $75 when I was around eight years old. The only way I could keep learning was by exploring and discovering (and library books).

Have a look at opera:config.

Clutter is bad by definition:

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/clutter

In UIs, it imposes cognitive load for little or no benefit.

I'm immensely grateful that I did some tech support in college. It taught me how much seemingly trivial, ignorable UI clutter caused real problems for people who aren't programmers. That is, the vast bulk of the population. Cognitive loads that are small for me can be giant for others. Letting me design a UI based on my own preferences is like letting NBA basketball players decide how to organize my kitchen cupboards.

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