Bugzilla

(In reply to rex4748 from comment #14)
> The General tab was extremely useful,

What for? What specific information in there is useful to you?

> but I used this primarily to browse through & view info about media on a page. It's significantly easier than having to inspect each thing, pick through the source, or use an add-on (which never quite accomplishes the same thing).

What's your purpose in "viewing info about media on a page" ? That is, what are you trying to do with the information displayed there? Wouldn't it be more useful to have it overlaid on the page, and be able to activate/deactivate the overlay with a toolbar item or similar? That's something that should be relatively straightforward with an add-on... but again, we're still kind of guessing at your usecase here - do you care about the file names of the media? Sizes? Content types? What goals are you trying to accomplish?

> I don't get why an option can't exist to return this, especially considering how useful it is and how long it has existed in the browser.

Because every option has a cost, and combinations of options have an even higher cost (e.g. trying to keep the access keys unique in the content context menu is already a nightmare, considering the number of different subsets of items can be shown simultaneously, and options make it worse). Doing so doesn't scale - we renamed (and thus sometimes changed access keys for) probably on the order of three dozen items, and removed a few others, in the last 2-3 months, and if we added an option for every single one (and yes, people are *very* unhappy even about some access key / labelling changes, cf. bug 1701324) , you can imagine how that stops making sense. I get it, you probably don't need the other three dozen options, so to you it's "just one option" - but likewise, the people who care about some of the other items might not care about "view page info", and to them too it's "just one option". To engineering (and the volunteer localizer community!) it ends up meaning "a lot of work".

(In reply to rex4748 from comment #14)
> The General tab was extremely useful,

What for? What specific information in there is useful to you?

> but I used this primarily to browse through & view info about media on a page. It's significantly easier than having to inspect each thing, pick through the source, or use an add-on (which never quite accomplishes the same thing).

What's your purpose in "viewing info about media on a page" ? That is, what are you trying to do with the information displayed there? Wouldn't it be more useful to have it overlaid on the page, and be able to activate/deactivate the overlay with a toolbar item or similar? That's something that should be relatively straightforward with an add-on... but again, we're still kind of guessing at your usecase here - do you care about the file names of the media? Sizes? Content types? What goals are you trying to accomplish?

> I don't get why an option can't exist to return this, especially considering how useful it is and how long it has existed in the browser.

Because every option has a cost, and combinations of options have an even higher cost (e.g. trying to keep the access keys unique in the content context menu is already a nightmare, considering the number of different subsets of items can be shown simultaneously, and options make it worse). Doing so doesn't scale - we renamed (and thus sometimes changed access keys for) probably on the order of three dozen items, and removed a few others, in the last 2-3 months, and if we added an option for every single one (and yes, people are *very* unhappy even about some access key / labelling changes, cf. bug 1701324) , you can imagine how that stops making sense. I get it, you probably don't need the other three dozen options, so to you it's "just one option" - but likewise, the people who care about some of the other items might not care about "view page info", and to them too it's "just one option". To engineering (and the volunteer localizer community!) it ends up meaning "a lot of work, which makes future work even harder" (because it has to remain compatible with all the existing options).

The additional options in about:config also aren't discoverable - if page info is really a crucial tool for lots of people, it shouldn't require going to about:config to enable it.