1545035 - Give web extensions access to about:config

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(WebExtensions :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Damien Cassou]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Fedora; Linux x86_64; rv:66.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/66.0

Steps to reproduce:

I see application developers struggle between giving users full control through a lot of options and giving a simple and understandable preference UI. Firefox got the best of both worlds: users can go to about:preferences to change the most important preferences and to about:config to change whatever they want and get full control.

Would it make sense to let web extension developers define preferences that would go to about:config so they don't have to clutter their preference UI with preferences very few care about?

For example: Some extensions show a badge with a number in the tool bar icon. Whereas most people want this badge, some might have good reasons to hide it. Instead of adding yet another checkbox to the extension preference UI, it would be cool to tell the advanced users they can hide the badge through about:config.

I started discussing that in https://github.com/browserpass/browserpass-extension/issues/103#issuecomment-483999608.

Comment 1

[Shane Caraveo (:mixedpuppy)]

about:config is not meant for normal users in general, and is not a generalized ui either. We would not provide extensions access to privileged ui regardless.