Javascript disabled and a site relies on it? "Hey, this site would probably work better if you enabled Javascript, but you have it disabled. Would you like to enable Javascript again? Or perhaps just for this page?"
SSL/TLS disabled? "Hey, so TLS is disabled, but I need it in order to show you this web page. You want me to enable it for you?"
The overarching theme here is not that there are too many options, but that there are too many poorly documented options with poorly documented consequences. Fixing that problem would give users the best of both worlds: flexibility and ease-of-use.
I think it's fine to have these options as extensions or even inside about:config, where the user would never disable by accident.
If they don't read, then they wouldn't be using Firefox, since all web pages (barring a few exceptions) would be gibberish to them :)
> And showing message box every damn time one site has Javascript/SSL
That's not what I'm advocating in that particular recommendation. I'm more advocating for some sort of heuristic analysis when Javascript is disabled. There are lots of sites that do silly things like rely entirely on Javascript for rendering text (for example); those should be easy-to-detect as scenarios where a warning would appear.
Also, most similar warnings presented by Firefox already (usually about outdated plugins and such) have a way to permanently dismiss, or to remember a setting for a particular website, or some other way to mitigate the understandable annoyance of always throwing warnings. A "don't ask me again" would immediately resolve the problem you identified.
> I think it's fine to have these options as extensions or even inside about:config, where the user would never disable by accident.
I think that's fine, too. My comment was more about identifying the correct cause of various effects - i.e. that the harmfulness of the checkboxes being criticized is due to their non-obviousness rather than their existence.
You can't get them to read prompts at all, let alone text on a page.
And from those discussions, and from my observations of those users, 99% of the problems discussed would be resolved if it was clear what options actually did. Users don't know or care what "Javascript" or "TLS" are, but you can bet your ass that if the relevant checkboxes had at least a basic explanation of why they should be checked (i.e. "Don't uncheck this box unless you know what you are doing; doing so will cause a lot of websites to break"), the vast majority of end-users will happily leave that box unchecked until they ask someone more knowledgable about it.
But in this case, we're dealing with users who somehow managed to disable JS, but are still surprised by the effects and don't read prompts.
I'm pretty sure such users exist, however instead of directly basing your UI descisions on this scenario, why not trying to investigate where such behavior comes from and how frequent it is?
Anybody that read my posts in the recent HN thread on building devices for safety (and the Therac-25 discussion) knows that I advocate strongly for spending the time and effort to make sure a design fails safely. It would indeed be a terrible design, for example, to provide a checkbox or radio button that let you disable important TLS/SSL security features. As a potentially serious safety risk, those features should be handled with great care. On the other hand, disabling javascript or image loading is not a safety risk; the worst that can happen to the user is they can't use some webpages. Removing the ability to disable those features isn't doing anything for the benefit of the user, it's Mozilla trying to avoid having to deal with tech support.
Some things in life need to be learned by experience, and by limiting the safer opportunities to lean about how the browser and the internet works, Mozilla is working to keep users ignorant when they should be doing everything they can to give their users the education they obviously need.
As for websites that break without javascript, this i just an excuse for lazy programming. Such sites should break, and Mozilla should loudly send any users complaining back to the websites that wrote broken, incomplete pages. This is yet another example where appeasement only hurts you in the long run.
http://www.sitepoint.com/javascript-dependency-backlash-myth...
(there is a difference between reduced functionality (which is perfectly acceptable) and totally breaking)
// here come the down-votes; saying anything bad about javascript is easily one of the faster ways to draw down vote - probably because far too many HN reader's paycheck rely on the user not being able to disable javascript
// don't bother replying if you just want to assert that javascript is necessary, because i have multiple existence proofs to the contrary. This does require finding alternatives for a handful of broken sites. Such is the cost of safety.
If users aren't putting in the effort to read warnings/error messages, or can't put two and two together and correlate why things aren't working on some sites with what they did with the settings (or even better, apply some more critical thinking and possibly Googling to figure out why), I think that's a sign of a deeper problem and trying to patch over it by dumbing down software interfaces is a horrible direction to take.
To become knowledgeable users of Web technologies and not mere consumers, they must be allowed to explore, experiment, and break, then fix things. Taking away these settings discourages that. "The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing."
FYI Alex Limi no longer works at Mozilla.
If you don't know what javascript is, don't disable it and complain things aren't working...
Well, fair game, given that those power users can switch browsers in the blink of an eye (). All my hopes go to the Vivaldi browser now.
The only problem is that these power users promote your browser and installed it on grandma's computer, and who make your precious extensions on occasion, often for free. Don't be surprised if you need partnerships now.
(*) Well, thinking about it normal users can also switch browsers in the blink of an eye, too. All it takes is Flashplayer update that sneakily install Chrome as the default browser. Just sayin'.
