302400 - Remove "disable common annoyances" and choose sensible defaults

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 299424

(Firefox :: Settings UI, defect)

Description

[Ben Basson]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050727 Firefox/1.0+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050727 Firefox/1.0+

Tools > Options > Content > Enable JavaScript has the secondary option "but
disable common annoyances". This checkbox replaces the previous "Advanced..."
dialog for JavaScript options, and is presumably designed to simplify things.

However, it's entirely unclear as to what this checkbox does, for new or
advanced users and should therefore be removed.

For new users, it'll be unclear as to which annoyances are disabled. If the
default for this checkbox is "checked", then they'll never change it (who wants
extra annoyances?) and if it's off, they probably won't understand what it
corresponds to in terms of behaviour.

For advanced users, it'll be unclear as to which preferences are toggled (and to
which state) when this is checked. With the previous UI, you set individual
preferences with corresponding checkboxes, now they are grouped. Advanced users
will ignore this UI and use about:config to tweak the settings to their liking.

Sensible defaults are a much more intuitive way of dealing with what JavaScript
should or should not do. For example, I think we're pretty clear that context
menus shouldn't ever be disabled or altered by web pages by default, nor should
status-bar text (since this is a phishing issue nowadays, and it's plain
annoying anyway).

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Ben Basson]

Nominating blocker for 1.8b4 for l10n. Please remove if this is inappropriate.

Comment 2

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

See already WONTFIX'ed Bug 283716. See Bug 299424 also.
WORKAROUND: Use SeaMonkey.

Comment 3

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

What to do with that pref is going to be sorted out in bug 299424, which is
already a blocker.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 299424 ***