360365 - Offer an extension for resetting now UI-less options (AKA the Release Notes don't tell you how to change hidden preferences)

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Simon Bünzli]

Short story:

Instead of just mentioning the prefs to be reset for those options which now lack UI (enable_automatic_image_resizing and cookieBehavior), offer an extension to reset them from the Release Notes.

Long story:

UI for browser.enable_automatic_image_resizing and network.cookie.cookieBehavior was removed for Firefox 2, UI for xpinstall.enabled was removed for Firefox 1.5. Two of these three were at least mentioned in the release notes, although I doubt that my father would have been able to reset any of them without further assistance.

For a security sensitive bug we had once a very simple, official extension to just switch off one feature. Why can't we offer similar extensions to reset those prefs so that (1) most users can apply the changes themselves and (2) users aren't unnecessarily exposed to about:config (which they're not supposed to see anyway)?

If that's no option at all (which it really should be as that's the least we could do - even post facto - for affected users), at least consider adding documentation for how to access hidden preferences (in the same way the Profile manager is documented).