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Comment by gear54rus | Hacker News Reader

Yeah because those who are aware how those things work can totally waste their time downloading addons to do basic things.

Common sense: you don't know what this control is for? DON'T touch it. Or touch it and face the consequences (learning's got to start somewhere, right?).

This article seems to encourage apple's way of thinking ('simple', 'just works') and this is one of the main reasons for me (and many other people, I reckon) to ignore all their products completely. You want to go this way? fine. Don't expect anyone technically-literate to use your thingie though (because it becomes harder to use for debugging and all those things than, say, Chrome). Also:

> Is it really worth having a preference panel that benefits fewer than 2% of users overall?

and then

> Even 1% of a few hundred million isn’t a trivial number of people.

Decide on it already :)

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I think there's a bit of nuance here - the point isn't entirely that you shouldn't have these options, it's more that it's extremely user unfriendly to have options in a primary preferences panel or menu that can be selected and will completely break the user experience, without any clear path to resolution.

I would say that since the code already exists to do these things, maybe the right way to deal with this is to move dangerous preferences to a sub-menu with warning signs, and then some sort of icon or notification to warn you that you've got a setting enabled that will break big swaths of the Internet.

I'm with you. Move advanced options to about:config, or somewhere similar.

>will completely break the user experience, without any clear path to resolution. //

Checkboxes have a clear path to resolution, you [un]check the box to return it to it's original state.

To prevent the user forgetting then perhaps configuration changes could be added to the history (or a different "undo-history") so the user can easily back-track.

I agree in theory, but remember that many of these options have unintended consequences that may not be clear. So, for example, the navigation bar disappears - how do you get it back? Where did it go?

Or disabling image loading, maybe it works fine on the first few sites you visit, but then you go to the google homepage and it stops working - what do you do then? What broke that functionality? What if you're not the person who [un]checked the box?

The perspective of the post is about how regular users might easily find themselves in a situation where "basic" settings broke core functionality in the browser unintentionally, without guidance on how to fix it.

I do like the "config change history" idea, though that might be Yet Another Panel(tm) that's too complicated for the regular user. But maybe there's a "Big Red Button" that firefox could have that sets things back to a "standard" or "known good" config. These types of things are great for novice users because you can tell someone, "Look, if you get into trouble, don't know what's going on, hit the big red button".

I've used stuff like this for certain family members who are not great with cmoputers - rather than trying to teach them all of the different knobs to twiddle, spend a lot of time teaching them how to get to a known good state ("Close all fo the windows and restart", etc.).

Uhm, Apple does actually provide easy root shell access to what is essentially Unix.

And the APIs to customize your desktop experience are much more permissive than what Windows allows. Or at least the Desktop customization apps do much more than their windows equivalents.

I'd say that having usable defaults is better than having easy customization. People who customize to that level don't care about it being "easy"(myself included).

On defaults, I agree completely.

On apple: look at the iphone vs android war. Android was and always will be a go-to for customization.

Apple's culture and ecosystem is restrictive. I think when they created iOS it was a natural fit to lock that shit down. However I will say that OS X remains fairly open, likely because it was created before Apple's culture shifted into playing parent (which is arguably a response to Windows XP's continual security problems).

Now, yes, people will point out that OS X only runs on Apple's hardware and that is restrictive. However as a counterpoint I will say that OS X is free and it would be uneconomical without that tie-in. That's their business model effectively.

Unfortunately the answer isn't that easy.

On one hand you have hundreds of millions of Internet users, including many from developing countries who have never used a PC in their lives. On the other you have Internet services that pile on endless 3rd party tech and scripts into their sites, most of which doesn't degrade properly.

The result is pretty much what the author highlighted. Sites will break. Users will be flummoxed.

I don't think we can wish away this problem by having users figure it out. I'm not saying Apple's shiny-button-abstraction is the answer, but there has to be a way for both users and websites to figure out non-standard browser config settings and pop up alerts.

> Decide on it already :)

You're saying, decide on the 2%, who need a rare feature, and who are technically capable enough to download an add-on... vs. the 1% of people who click the wrong thing, and are not technically capable to fix what happened. That's easy—pick the 1%, and move the browser-breaking things into an add-on, or something that a stray click won't trigger. Which is what the author is arguing.

The author says "is it worth it for 2% of people?" thus implying that 2% is a small number.

Then later he says "it's 1% of people! that's a LOT of people!"

The point is that 1-2% of people is either a LOT of people and worth caring about, or it's not. If so, keep the options and make it harder to break. If not, delete it all and don't worry about it. It's self-contradictory to do otherwise.

When a minor inconvenience hit 1%, I think it is fair to call it few, when I major breakage hit 1% of users I think it is fair to call that a lot.

The only way that makes sense to me is if you're talking about the magnitude of the problem rather than strictly speaking the number of people affected.

1% * 10% problem severity = 0.1% people-problem severity

1% * 50% problem severity = 0.5% people-problem severity

If you do the math that way, sure.

Here's the thing, though: you don't (nor does the author) get to say "it's a minor inconvenience" because you're not the person being inconvenienced! Only the people who want the functionality and won't have it anymore can tell you the magnitude of the problem. And the guy writing the article clearly didn't ask any of the people who use the feature either.

When your revenue comes from people using your product so that you can collect advertising and search revenue, every percent counts. How much would the business side people be willing to spend to grow the user base 1%? Ask yourself that before you do something to alienate 1% of your users and then think "is there a way we can make this better without causing people to switch?"

Additionally, I think a key part of learning about something is to have that control and information there. It's hard for me to say where I'd be today if every application had a UI which was designed against the entire idea of me having to learn something. I might have never had the interest to learn more. The first, and often most important step to learning about anything abstract is knowing that it exists.

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