Mozilla is working on cleaning up the preferences and leave only the ones that make sense

Apr 11, 2013 11:31 GMT  ·  By

Last month, Mozilla's Alex Limi got plenty of attention over the analysis of the options and preferences available in Firefox. He found that many of them aren't relevant to regular users and in fact many may be dangerous as they would break the browser if messed with.

He proposed a critical analysis of every option available in the preference box, with the scope of determining whether it makes sense for it to be there or it's just a relic from a different time on the web.

He focused on Firefox, though his criticism applies to every browser and every piece of software out there.

The good news is that Mozilla has already started to do that. In the very latest Firefox 23 Nightly release, a few options have been removed from the preferences dialog.

There aren't any radical changes, just some very obvious low-hanging fruit, like the options to load images and JavaScript.

While there was a time when users had legitimate uses for those options, the vast, vast majority of users today don't, so it makes sense to remove them.

Very, very few people benefit from disabling images on the web. At the same time, many sites use images as navigational elements, so disabling images will render those sites unusable.

The same goes for JavaScript, very, very few sites work properly without JavaScript. Most users don't need to be able to disable JavaScript so easily, especially when it has such a large impact on browsing. Disabling JavaScript can lead to problems that are hard to troubleshoot by regular users.

People who do need to disable JavaScript, for whatever reason, are very well served by the NoScript add-on, one of the big reasons to use Firefox in the first place. And, of course, the option to disable JavaScript is still available in about:config.

Some may complain that this restricts choice, but it's the exact opposite. Making available every knob possible, giving users the option to modify everything about the browser is not choice, it's a cop out. It's Mozilla saying, here's everything that you can do to the browser, knock yourself out.

Without help and instructions, options are useless. A smaller selection of preferences can be less intimidating and knowing you won't break anything will lead to more experimentation. This safety is what gives users choice, not hundreds of buttons and settings.