288764 - Add ability to hide some of the more advanced prefs

Status: ASSIGNED

(SeaMonkey :: Preferences, enhancement)

Description

[Ian Neal]

This was mentioned by Kairo and others as something that would be nice to have
so that certain prefs and pref panels can be hidden and that setting can be
configured to match the IT literacy of the user.

Comment 1

[Ian Neal]

Attachment: Working in progress patch v0.0

This patch:
* Adds a new integer pref "prefs.level" which at the moment understands 3
values:
  0 - Basic
  1 - Standard
  2 - Extended
* Adds two broadcasters to pref.xul:
  prefStandard - if elements observe this they only show when prefs.level = 1
or 2
  prefExtended - if elements observe this they only show when prefs.level = 2
* Adds a new attribute for pref panels - preflevel
  if not set or = 0 preference is always shown
  if = 1 preference is shown for Standard or Extended
  if = 2 preference is shown for just Extended

The observers and preflevel shown in the patch for preftree.xul and
pref-appearance.xul are as example only - the decision on which level various
prefs sit at has not been made yet.

Still to be done:
* Ability to hide an element without a prefstring set, for example groupbox

Comment 2

[Robert Kaiser]

(In reply to comment #1)
>   1 - Standard

Please name that "Medium" or something like that, so we can still freely define
what's our default without confussing anyone :)

Comment 3

[Ian Neal]

Via IRC:
(11:11:52) CTho: KaiRo: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=288764#c2
basic/intermediate/advanced ?
(11:22:39) KaiRo: CTho: intermediate doesn't sound bad, yes...

Comment 4

[Hogarth]

I'm not all that fussed but I thought I'd just throw this into the ring. The
names chosen are just what popped into my mind so I'm not fussed. They're just
there to express the idea of what these settings wind up representing:

Common
Obscure
Esoteric

These kinds of names also have the advantage of not making a judgement call as
to the users abilities. They merely reflect how likely a user is going to want
to go through them and change them.

As an example out of the air: a switch to change middlemouse.contentLoadURL
would mostlikely go into Esoteric. It's not something most people would even
think of or bother with but I find that I can't live without it and so having an
easy way to deal with it is lovely.

Please noone take this as a fanatical desire that things must be named like
this. It's more of a thought starter on what to avoid (advanced and intermediate
 are not my favourites. advanced is more of a judgement call on the user and
intermediate is kinda meaningless).

Comment 5

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

we should just remove UI for "obscure" and "esoteric" stuff.

Comment 6

[Hogarth]

Well as another example, smtpauth (from what I have seen) is pretty obscure. It
rarely gets used. It's not advanced, intermediate or whatnot either (it simply
is a setting that rarely gets used) and if you were to remove it from the UI it
would be rather bad.

It's not as easy as that. Hiding (obscuring ;) some prefs IS a good idea.
Perhaps a 'Tune' or some other word would be a good idea. For example, the main
screen would have the option for find-as-you-type but there'd be a button to
tune it/config it to your tastes (I prefer to hit / beforehand and not get a
noise). The name for this though has to be short, sweet, scream out 'more
potentially useful stuff here' but it also needs to say 'if you don't want to
bother with it, feel free not to'.

IMO anyway :)

Comment 7

[Ian Neal]

Attachment: Provisional categorisation of prefs v0.0a

This very much a first pass of which prefs/panels/trees slot into which pref
category - please make constructive suggestions for changes to this list.

Basic should cover users who want to do some simple customisation of the suite
but nothing too complex
Intermediate should cover users who want to do more complex customisation of
the suite and one-off changes needed for typical initial setup.
Advanced should cover the indepth pref changes and development/debugging prefs.

Comment 8

[Peter Weilbacher]

I'm really sceptic that this will do something good. If you choose Basic as default one always has to prefix "please switch on intermediate or advanced mode and then go to Prefs->... to do..." while trying to help users in forums and usenet. While if Intermediate is default who would ever switch to Basic anyway? Most applications that tried this in the past have finally found other ways to deal with this now (like GNOME's Nautilus), shouldn't that tell us something?

I think the goal should rather be to restructure the prefs panel and make some prefs easier to find (e.g. why the heck is animation mode under Privacy, why are Scripts & Plugins under Advanced and not under Privacy, I always look for them under the wrong main item).

Comment 9

[Benoît]

This sounds to me like trying to be like Firefox, which is bad.
This is SeaMonkey, where everything is visible. It's pretty easy to find everything, even for novice users, because most things are logically organized.

Comment 10

[Chris Thomas (CTho) [formerly [e-mail] [e-mail]]]

(In reply to comment #9)
> It's pretty easy to find
> everything, even for novice users, because most things are logically organized.
> 

I strongly disagree.  The organization is far from good.  It took me forever to find the pref to automatically scale images and the pref to control whether toolbar buttons show text or just the icon.  They're both on the root Appearance tab.  I figured the first one was a Navigator thing (after all, what else shows me images?) and had no idea where the toolbar option would be.  And why is "When SeaMonkey starts up, open <application>" an Appearance pref?  That doesn't make much sense.  I generally have a hard time finding prefs unless I alreay know where they are, and I like to think I'm a little better than a novice at this by now.

Comment 11

[Stefan [:stefanh]]

I agree with comment #8. What we really need instead is reorganizing the prefs. But I doubt that could be done for 1.1, though.

Comment 12

[Jonathan Pritchard]

(In reply to comment #11)
> I agree with comment #8. What we really need instead is reorganizing the prefs.
> But I doubt that could be done for 1.1, though.
> 

I also agree with both comment #11 and #8.

SeaMonkey is for power users and people who already know the preference tree.

If anything a reorganisation is needed. We should not obfuscate the advanced preferences. Just reorganise perhaps.

Comment 13

[Serge Gautherie (:sgautherie)]

Ian,
Are you still working on this ?

Comment 14

[Ian Neal]

This will probably be re-evaluated once migration to new pref window has been completed.