147750 - All user.js preferences should be accessible in a UI dialog

Status: CLOSED DUPLICATE of bug 17199

(SeaMonkey :: Preferences, enhancement)

Description

[David Tenser [:djst]]

From David Tenser ([e-mail]):
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.0.0+)
Gecko/20020528
BuildID:    2002052809

In Mozilla, I believe there's an "about:config" method for getting all the
available preferences that can be set in the program, such as
"network.protocol-handler.external.mailto".

Since it seems to be possible to extract all these preferences and list them,
why wouldn't it be possible to create a dialog for all these preferences?

In Internet Explorer, there's an "Advanced" tab with checkboxes only. From what
I understand, these checkboxes are not built into the program itself. The
available settings are read from the Windows registry so you could virtually add
a new preference to that dialog, by adding it to the registry (however, those
prefs wouldn't be used in IE itself, of course!).

I would like to see the same feature in Mozilla. In the preferences dialog,
there would be a section where all available true/false preferences would be
listed with their current state (checked/unchecked).

Wouldn't this be so much easier for most users to change a setting like
"network.protocol-handler.external.mailto" or
"news.persist_server_open_state_in_folderpane"? The checkboxes would of course
be created in run-time, compiled from the list of available true/false settings
that Mozilla has inside.

Of course, we could also list non-true/false settings, such as values, strings,
etc, to virtually list every single setting in the whole Mozilla application.
The "about:config" method lists exactly this. By just making that list editable,
we would have the functionality there already!

Instead of browsing through your profile directory on the computer, perhaps
creating a fresh user.js file, and so on, you could just change everything from
inside Mozilla itself. If a new setting is added in a future version of Mozilla,
the dialog itself doesn't need to be updated, since it builds the list of
settings during run-time.

Comment 1

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 17199 ***

Comment 2

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

marking verified as a duplicate.

if you decide to reopen this bug, please clarify why.

search string for bugspam removal: SalviaGuaranitica

Comment 3

[David Tenser [:djst]]

.