437462 - Enhancement request for about:config to make it more usable

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Brian Vanderburg]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.9) Gecko/20071025 Firefox/2.0.0.9
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.9) Gecko/20071025 Firefox/2.0.0.9

Currently about:config is just one long list of options.  To enhance it I'd like to suggest two suggestions.

1.  Allow each preference to have as well as a name, a meaningful description.  This could be shown in a column 'Preference Descritpion' or as a mouse-over tooltip.

2.  Allow viewing the preferences as a tree-based layout.  For a preference in the form of 'a.b.c.d' any given item is a container if a preference or container exists 'under it', that is 'a.b.c' is a container because 'a.b.c.d' exists, whether it is an actual preference or just a container for child items.  Also an item can be a preference.  For something that is only a container, it would not have anything for the other columns than the name, but if it is also a preference, it would show the status, type, and value as well.

if a is a preference with a child preference a.b.c, but a.b is not a preference but only a container (it has a preference under it), it woudl look sometihng like:

a - <status> - <type> - <value>
>>b <nothing>
>>>>c - <status> - <type> - <value>

Such a tree can be easily expanded/collapsed.  At the start of 'about:config' it should be collapsed and only the top-level names shown.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
n/a
Actual Results:  
n/a

Expected Results:  
n/a

n/a

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

about:config doesn't belong to preferences which is only about the UI in tools/options

marking NEW as valid enhancement request

Comment 2

[Gingerbread Man]

1. More or less the same thing as bug 744255 and bug 908266.

2. Bug 193079