514859 - create an extension to help to give right values to more advanced parameters

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Dominique De Vito]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; fr; rv:1.9.0.12) Gecko/2009070611 Firefox/3.0.12 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; fr; rv:1.9.0.12) Gecko/2009070611 Firefox/3.0.12 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

Firefox gives no easy way to set appropriate values to most advanced parameters.

Reproducible: Always



Expected Results:  
If I remember correctly, Firefox is using, for example, clever algorithms for improving web navigation, like prefetching the expected next web pages while exploring the links of the already downloaded pages. While this may speed navigation, it's going to increase the Firefox memory consumption and decrease Firefox responsiveness. My Internet bandwidth is good enough so that I don't care about prefetching web pages in background: I would rather prefer it to be more responsive. 

Then, my first idea was it could be a good idea if Firefox could propose, during the first start-up, to choose among different loading parameters: for example, Firefox might ask the user if he/she prefers performance (with loading optimizations in background) with a high bandwith+CPU, or responsiveness (no page prefetch) but with a lower high bandwith+CPU.

Asking such a question could be seen as weird for most users during startup time, so my second idea is to propose to assign most advanced Firefox parameters according to a set of questions, but through the help of an extension. Then, only users who want to deal with such Firefox customisation, and who have downloaded such extension, would be involed.

Comment 1

[Andre Klapper]

(In reply to Dominique De Vito from comment #0)
> Firefox might ask the user if he/she prefers performance (with
> loading optimizations in background) with a high bandwith+CPU, or
> responsiveness (no page prefetch) but with a lower high bandwith+CPU.

Should't Firefox just be good in all of them, so this is not needed?

> Asking such a question could be seen as weird for most users

It sounds like advanced stuff that most users will just not be interested in.
Doesn't about:config already fulfil this and provide all the options that you want?