1643639 - Hide some urlbar prefs that may cause trouble to the user

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Address Bar, task, P3)

Description

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

A few of the prefs we expose may cause troubles if set wrongly, or disable important security features. These should not be exposed by default, it will still be possible to create them.

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Attachment: Bug 1643639 - Hide some urlbar prefs that may cause trouble to the user. r=dao

Comment 2

[Virtual_ManPL [:Virtual] 🇵🇱 - (please needinfo? me - so I will see your comment/reply/question/etc.)]

Is this affecting visibility of preference in about:config or just somewhere in Firefox Options GUI?

Comment 3

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

just about:config

Comment 4

[Virtual_ManPL [:Virtual] 🇵🇱 - (please needinfo? me - so I will see your comment/reply/question/etc.)]

I find censoring and hiding any preference in about:config by Mozilla as extremely annoying and irritating, because where power users can find all these information in one place, except about:config? There is no any proper documentation. What's more, I think it's inappropriate to presume that users don't understand consequences of their changes. There is also this warning in about:config:

Proceed with Caution

Changing advanced configuration preferences can impact Nightly performance or security.
Warn me when I attempt to access these preferences
[Accept the Risk and Continue]

which is more then enough.

If there is some "imaginary"

prefs that may cause trouble to the user

or

"unconscious person going through about:config and looking for ways to disable some visual effect (like the expansion for example, since formatting may sound like changing the urlbar visuals)"

there is always better method to deal with it, like changing preference name for example.

Censoring and hiding preferences won't be stopping tutorials making Firefox - "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger".

Please reconsider this change, especially for:

• browser.urlbar.formatting.enabled (accessibility feature for users with vision and eyes problems=black font is easier to read than gray font)
• browser.urlbar.delay (no delay=no time wasted)

Thank you very much in advance.

Comment 5

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

(In reply to Virtual_ManPL [:Virtual] 🇵🇱 - (please needinfo? me - so I will see your comment/reply/question/etc.) from comment #4)

I find censoring and hiding any preference in about:config by Mozilla as extremely annoying and irritating

This is totally unfair, in particular speaking about censorship.
The scope of this bug is to remove footguns, things that create serious enough performance or security problems. And the options keep working anyway.
Nobody should really fiddle with browser.urlbar.delay, it exists only for technical reasons and it's unsupported (could go away at any time), because it has very serious performance implications. Then I'm hiding 2 unfinished feature, and formatting has serious spoofing implications for which one must evaluate very well whether to touch it, at that point creating the pref is not really a big deal.

Comment 6

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

note that setting delay to zero is totally different from "no time wasted", indeed it can actually cause the opposite by flooding the disk with I/O. And that's why these prefs should be hidden, people don't know what are their consequences.

Comment 7

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/f5309db93bc0
Hide some urlbar prefs that may cause trouble to the user. r=dao

Comment 8

[Razvan Maries]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/f5309db93bc0