1650202 - Consider moving experimental features to about:config

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Settings UI, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)]

Attachment: Annotation 2020-07-02 211251.png

Since most users who want to try experimental features will go to about:config anyways, and we want to help users change the right preferences and prevent mistakes, we can show the experimental features in about:config.

This will also have the benefit of not making about:preferences more complicated.

Attaching a mockup designed by @designakt.

Comment 1

[Maria Heres, inactive, contact Ecosystem QA]

The QA team has some concerns if the feature were to be moved in about:config:

• Encouraging users to access about:config would increase the chance of them modifying other preferences as well, which we are afraid would lead to breakage. Combined with the fact that the users have to remember which preferences they modified, this could lead to negative consequences if they don’t know which pref change caused an issue.
• Users would have a harder time actually finding the experimental features, seeing as they would have to specifically search for a preference to change.

Comment 2

[Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)]

(In reply to Maria Heres, :mheres, Ecosystem QA from comment #1)

The QA team has some concerns if the feature were to be moved in about:config:

• Encouraging users to access about:config would increase the chance of them modifying other preferences as well, which we are afraid would lead to breakage. Combined with the fact that the users have to remember which preferences they modified, this could lead to negative consequences if they don’t know which pref change caused an issue.

• The move to about:config would reduce the number of users enabling untested/unsupported features, reduce complexity of about:preferences, and also reduce complexity of about:config. By moving these to about:config, we can make the default view of about:config just show these experimental features, and require a second step before showing the bare-bones preferences.
• Features that are enabled can be styled such that the user knows which are modified, this is already done in about:config.

• Users would have a harder time actually finding the experimental features, seeing as they would have to specifically search for a preference to change.

• Some websites already tell users to visit about:config to try out a new feature. Moving this to about:config would align with that community. Making these a little harder to find may also be good considering we might not want a non-technical user to enable experimental features since they may be unsupported/untested.

Comment 3

[Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)]

Not working on this at the moment