10 ms·

> Shouldn’t you be able to restrict how much disk space is being used? It turns out, we know that you are low on disk space, and will reduce our usage according

by agwa 14y ago

> Shouldn’t you be able to restrict how much disk space is being used? It turns out, we know that you are low on disk space, and will reduce our usage accordingly. It’s pretty likely that Firefox keeps better track of this than humans do. No. Here's a case where Firefox will definitely not do a better job: an NFS-based computer lab environment where users have individual quotas - the statfs() syscall (i.e. what the `df` command uses) returns you the amount of disk space available to everyone, which is enormous. Firefox then attempts to use that space, and quickly exhausts the user's quota. This is a real-life scenario and the current solution among users is to set the cache size to 0 - the Internet connection is damn fast anyways and they'd rather use their space to store actual files. For the love of god, what is wrong with having an Advanced options panel? The author's stated goal is "to design software that can be used by everyone " but when you remove options like this, you make your product not usable by some people unless they do additional research to find the hidden about:config option or install some add-on. The bug for this is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=851698 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=851698 - if you think this is a bad idea I encourage you to leave a comment there (but be nice). Mozilla may otherwise not realize that this is such a bad, unpopular idea.

krschultz 14y ago
The setting is vitally important for an extremely small number of people. That sounds to me like it should be moved into an add-on. The users affected still can get the capability while the rest of the world is spared another setting that clutters the UI.
- derleth 14y ago
  Clutter is not bad in and of itself.
  - jdechko 14y ago
    about:config is a great place for this kind of tweak. In fact, most of these check boxes the author talked about would fit in right at home in about:config.
    - sergiosgc 14y ago
      Even more so if about:config included a one-liner explaining what the option is for. Sprinkle search/hierarchization on top of the about:config and suddenly the rule can be "if 99% of the users don't need the option, it goes into about:config only".
      - claudius 14y ago
        Sounds like opera:config - which doesn’t render the ‘Advanced’ tab in its Preferences menu useless.
      - jdechko 14y ago
        The about:config window has a giant search box right at the top of it. It's not hierarchical, but its sorted alphabetically, so, for instance, all accessibility.* options are grouped together. A short description would be nice, though.
        subsection1h 14y ago
        A short description would be nice, though. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/config-descriptions/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/config-descri...
    - nitrogen 14y ago
      about:config is horrible because it's not hierarchically organized. A big fat list of items is much more difficult to use than multiple tabs or pages of related options with widgets appropriate to their data types. "Advanced" shouldn't automatically mean "difficult by design."
      - jdechko 14y ago
        But how many people just browse the about:config window looking for settings to change? I go in there looking for a specific setting because I've searched google first, and found a website that explains what setting I need to change. Use the search bar and it filters the list for you.
  - wpietri 14y ago
    Clutter is bad by definition: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/clutter http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/clutter In UIs, it imposes cognitive load for little or no benefit. I'm immensely grateful that I did some tech support in college. It taught me how much seemingly trivial, ignorable UI clutter caused real problems for people who aren't programmers. That is, the vast bulk of the population. Cognitive loads that are small for me can be giant for others. Letting me design a UI based on my own preferences is like letting NBA basketball players decide how to organize my kitchen cupboards.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
- Groxx 14y ago
  I'll claim it's more likely users affected will not see any way to prevent it, not find the add-on, write off Firefox as bloated, and use something else. The geekier side of the affected users may find the add-on, sure. But they're not the only ones affected.
- agwa 14y ago
  What's wrong with clutter in an advanced tab? The only clutter exposed to the "rest of the world" is a tab that says "advanced" which is not really clutter at all. If you remove options from your product that are vitally important to even a small number of users your product can no longer "be used by anyone."
  - Silhouette 14y ago
    Isn't the logical conclusion of this kind of reasoning that everyone should become a programmer and browsers should be supplied in source form only, so everyone can customise any tiny detail they want to? That's not exactly a realistic prospect for most non-geeks. User interface development for mainstream software is invariably a balance between presenting something accessible to novice/occasional users and presenting something powerful to expert/frequent users. You can go a long way to helping both groups with a thoughtful design, but there's always going to be someone who wants something slightly (or completely) different. For mainstream software, trying to please everyone all the time is a fool's game. That's what bespoke development is for.
    - colinshark 14y ago
      No. It's just a matter of having advanced options or not. Each level of customization should be progressively more hidden but more powerful.
      - Silhouette 14y ago
        But where do you draw the line? What constitutes an "advanced option" worthy of dedicated UI rather than a customised build? What proportion or minimum number of users have to find it valuable for the effort and lost simplicity to be justified? When there are too many advanced options to manage sensibly, do we move to "advanced", "really advanced" and "actually quite scary you even thought of this" options?
        chris_wot 14y ago
        Love to know how numbers of users affected is measured. One of the arguments is that with a large enough number of users (millions) an option can cause significant numbers of people grief if they misuse it. Same argument can be said for removing a feature 2% of the population of users rely on. 2% of 450 million users is 9 million users. Not what I'd call a tiny number of users.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- hysan 14y ago
  Small number of people overall does not take into account where those users are concentrated. A lot of the options he uses as examples are extremely useful in third world countries where Firefox actually dominates the competition precisely because of how easy it is to configure it to be a low bandwidth browser. Africa probably being the best example of where Firefox dominates. So while it may be 2% overall, it could be something huge like 50% of the userbase in specific demographics/regions.
  - chris_wot 14y ago
    2% of 450 million users is 9 million users.
krenel 14y ago
> For the love of god, what is wrong with having an Advanced options panel? The OP seems to think about the average user and decides that a lot of stuff is not needed in Firefox options. But the average user does NOT click on Advances Options in any case. To be fare, the average user do not click on Preferences at all. Is not bad idea to have some of this options as plugins, though. But we must remember that if the "average user" clicks on "Full screen" button (or even worse, F11), he/she'll probably have to reboot the computer in order to "fix" de computer.
- XorNot 14y ago
  The "average user" is also not a real user. There aren't actual average users - they're a conceptual aggregate of a broad-range of users who may use entirely different sets of features, which share only a few common overlaps. You can not damage the "average user" at all, but manage to break the workflow of most of your real users but eliminating parts of the set of features they depend on. i.e. remove 100 different features only used by 1% of your users, and it's actually quite likely you've removed features 100% of your users use.
  - agwa 14y ago
    That's a really good way of putting it.
  - Erwin 14y ago
    However the workflow issues you break are sometimes something like this: http://xkcd.com/1172/ http://xkcd.com/1172/ -- that may be a problem with software you paid $1 for 3 years ago and expected forever to work exactly as you need it.
    - nitrogen 14y ago
      Why shouldn't one expect to have one's purchased goods remain available indefinitely, no matter the price? This comic is not meant to be a justification for removing actual features.
singlow 14y ago
They don't need to remove the ability to override - they just need to remove it from the preference panel. As long as it is still available as a configuration change though an about:config screen or equivalent - admins in specialized environments can set it appropriately. In fact - they are more likely to set it through a registry setting or a domain policy and would never go to the preference panel at all.
tptacek 14y ago
I think you're dragging the article to a conclusion it didn't try to make. For the love of god, he didn't say that software can't have "Advanced" options panels. He pointed out a series of specific options that were either ill-advised, overly accessible, or so unusable as to be hardly better than a properties file. Firefox really does have an easily-reached config panel with "Use SSL 3.0" and "Use TLS 1.0" on it. What is the situation in which any user at your lab would know which of those options is sensible? Neither of them are the current version of TLS. Both of them have cryptographic flaws. And both are extremely widespread. Firefox really does have a top-level config panel with a checkbox that disables automatic image loading. It's not even an "advanced" option. I don't think your comment really engages with the article. What should the top-level options for a browser be?
- Hello71 14y ago
  Remove TLS version UI (Options > Advanced > Encryption > Protocols) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=733632 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=733632
- agwa 14y ago
  Several of the options (cache, TLS, certificate manager) he cited are already in the advanced panel and he wants to kill them. And in several places he explicitly says that these killed options (whether they're currently in the advanced panel or not) should be replaced by add-ons, not by an advanced option or even by about:config. So I don't think I dragged the article to a conclusion it didn't try to make. The article is clearly about killing options which I contend people need, and I think should be placed in an advanced section rather than killed.
  - tptacek 14y ago
    He wants to kill those options. Not all the options. I don't think that was a good-faith response. Can you defend the SSL 3.0 and TLS 1.0 checkboxes?
    - arjie 14y ago
st3fan 14y ago
Oh you are one of the 5 people who use an NFS-based setup?
- voidlogic 14y ago
  Many computer lab like environments use NFS... While there may not be a lot of these, they can have hundreds of machines...
- ZoFreX 14y ago
  This was a problem at my university too, not a massive one though. Certainly an add-on could fix it rather than an option (really what would be ideal would be better group policy-style management of FireFox across workstations). In this instance I have to wonder if FireFox couldn't look for a quota - it can be detected.
JoshTriplett 14y ago
No, don't solicit spam for the bug that wants to remove the options; instead, go file a bug saying that Firefox should check the user's quota in addition to statfs. Easily added, and then Firefox becomes that much more automatic.
- agwa 14y ago
  > No, don't solicit spam for the bug that wants to remove the options It's not spam to discuss the merits of implementing a feature request. > instead, go file a bug saying that Firefox should check the user's quota in addition to statfs. Easily added, and then Firefox becomes that much more automatic. Not possible - the quota information is not made available in any standard way, but rather by a non-standard dot file in the user's home directory. I know the quota information should be exported by rquotad but things aren't always that neat in the real world. Even if it were possible users may still prefer not to sacrifice any of their quota-limited home directory to Firefox cache. Who's Mozilla to presume they know what users want?
  - JoshTriplett 14y ago
    > It's not spam to discuss the merits of implementing a feature request. First of all, note that the tracking bug you linked to doesn't even track or discuss any bug about removing the cache options, making it pointless to bring up there. It wouldn't be spam for you file a bug requesting a fix for quota handling. It also wouldn't be spam for you to post a note to the bug about removing the cache options to point at the quota bug, and to make sure it'll stick around as an about:config option. However, canvassing for other people to go post to a bugzilla tracking bug just leads to noise like the current pile of comments in bug 851698; the vast majority of the comments in that bug, especially the ones by users labeled "(New to Bugzilla)", do indeed constitute spam, and those same comments show up in just about every bug trying to clean up the UI. See also https://www.xkcd.com/1172/ https://www.xkcd.com/1172/ . > Not possible - the quota information is not made available in any standard way, but rather by a non-standard dot file in the user's home directory. I know the quota information should be exported by rquotad but things aren't always that neat in the real world. So, we've started from "bug only seen by people running Firefox over NFS", already a very small fraction of users, and then shrunk the audience further to people who don't even use the standard quota mechanisms. An option to serve that vanishingly small fraction of users seems like precisely the domain of about:config. > Even if it were possible users may still prefer not to sacrifice any of their quota-limited home directory to Firefox cache. And those users can go tweak the setting in about:config, or you could tweak it for them by changing the system-wide default. That doesn't make it appropriate to put in the main configuration UI; not enough people use it, and its very existence in the UI hurts more people than it helps. > Who's Mozilla to presume they know what users want? Makers of a browser used by hundreds of millions of users, with extensive data from actual user testing, tons of statistical data telling them which settings and UI options people actually touch, and most importantly an understanding that just because an option has users doesn't mean it should continue to exist, and that the noisiest people on Bugzilla frequently don't represent a significant fraction of users. about:config exists to satisfy use cases like yours. Tone down the rhetoric and understand that when your software has hundreds of millions of users, every single change represents a tradeoff between who it might help and who it might hurt. This one seems far easier than most.
smnrchrds 14y ago
I think disabling cache could improve SSD lifespan. I would leave that option to the users.
adnam 14y ago
He said 'pretty likely' didn't he?
ianb 14y ago
Most prefs live on in about:config, and can be set in peers.js. This is probably easier to automate anyway.
hysan 14y ago
I made an account to try and leave a comment but seems like I don't have permission to do so. If you can, I'd be grateful if you left this comment for me: > Before moving forward with this suggestion, please do a usage analysis for each of these options (or any future suggested options) based on regions in the world. Several of these options (images - which doesn't break Google for me, javascript, cache) are all things that appear on the surface to be very useful in third world countries where bandwidth & hardware is very limited. The ease of finding and configuring these options might be precisely why Firefox has a healthy lead over competing browser in Africa. So while the overall percent of users is 2%, this number possibly shoots up to a majority of the user base when looking at specific regions or demographics. Specifically, image & javascript would help with bandwidth. Cache override/disable would be useful on devices like the Raspberry Pi that run off of flash media (or for use cases like running Firefox off a flash drive ala PortableApps); the type of hardware I would expect to be more widely used in 3rd world countries.
seanp2k2 14y ago
Also, because no one uses SSDs and those definitely don't have a limited number of writes. That said, they could make it smarter ("We see that you're using an SSD but you have some free space on this other disk. Should we use that for cache instead? Click here to read more about SSD write cycles...") or just cache in RAM only.
- ygra 14y ago
  Even with a page file on an SSD I haven't had a problem over years of operation. Granted, this is anecdotal, but wear levelling wouldn't exist if it made no discernable difference. Windows disables defragmenting on SSDs, but from what I gathered that's not so much because of write cycles but rather because it makes no performance difference and thus is time unnecessarily spent. That being said, making the algorithms smarter should probably help, e.g. only caching in memory if there is an SSD and just store frequently-used sites' resources on disk which might be a viable compromise.

by agwa 14y ago

krschultz 14y ago

The setting is vitally important for an extremely small number of people. That sounds to me like it should be moved into an add-on. The users affected still can get the capability while the rest of the world is spared another setting that clutters the UI.

derleth 14y ago
Clutter is not bad in and of itself.
- jdechko 14y ago
  about:config is a great place for this kind of tweak. In fact, most of these check boxes the author talked about would fit in right at home in about:config.
  - sergiosgc 14y ago
    Even more so if about:config included a one-liner explaining what the option is for. Sprinkle search/hierarchization on top of the about:config and suddenly the rule can be "if 99% of the users don't need the option, it goes into about:config only".
    - claudius 14y ago
      Sounds like opera:config - which doesn’t render the ‘Advanced’ tab in its Preferences menu useless.
    - jdechko 14y ago
      The about:config window has a giant search box right at the top of it. It's not hierarchical, but its sorted alphabetically, so, for instance, all accessibility.* options are grouped together. A short description would be nice, though.
      - subsection1h 14y ago
        A short description would be nice, though. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/config-descriptions/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/config-descri...
  - nitrogen 14y ago
    about:config is horrible because it's not hierarchically organized. A big fat list of items is much more difficult to use than multiple tabs or pages of related options with widgets appropriate to their data types. "Advanced" shouldn't automatically mean "difficult by design."
    - jdechko 14y ago
      But how many people just browse the about:config window looking for settings to change? I go in there looking for a specific setting because I've searched google first, and found a website that explains what setting I need to change. Use the search bar and it filters the list for you.
- wpietri 14y ago
  Clutter is bad by definition: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/clutter http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/clutter In UIs, it imposes cognitive load for little or no benefit. I'm immensely grateful that I did some tech support in college. It taught me how much seemingly trivial, ignorable UI clutter caused real problems for people who aren't programmers. That is, the vast bulk of the population. Cognitive loads that are small for me can be giant for others. Letting me design a UI based on my own preferences is like letting NBA basketball players decide how to organize my kitchen cupboards.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
Groxx 14y ago
I'll claim it's more likely users affected will not see any way to prevent it, not find the add-on, write off Firefox as bloated, and use something else. The geekier side of the affected users may find the add-on, sure. But they're not the only ones affected.
agwa 14y ago
What's wrong with clutter in an advanced tab? The only clutter exposed to the "rest of the world" is a tab that says "advanced" which is not really clutter at all. If you remove options from your product that are vitally important to even a small number of users your product can no longer "be used by anyone."
- Silhouette 14y ago
  Isn't the logical conclusion of this kind of reasoning that everyone should become a programmer and browsers should be supplied in source form only, so everyone can customise any tiny detail they want to? That's not exactly a realistic prospect for most non-geeks. User interface development for mainstream software is invariably a balance between presenting something accessible to novice/occasional users and presenting something powerful to expert/frequent users. You can go a long way to helping both groups with a thoughtful design, but there's always going to be someone who wants something slightly (or completely) different. For mainstream software, trying to please everyone all the time is a fool's game. That's what bespoke development is for.
  - colinshark 14y ago
    No. It's just a matter of having advanced options or not. Each level of customization should be progressively more hidden but more powerful.
    - Silhouette 14y ago
      But where do you draw the line? What constitutes an "advanced option" worthy of dedicated UI rather than a customised build? What proportion or minimum number of users have to find it valuable for the effort and lost simplicity to be justified? When there are too many advanced options to manage sensibly, do we move to "advanced", "really advanced" and "actually quite scary you even thought of this" options?
      - chris_wot 14y ago
        Love to know how numbers of users affected is measured. One of the arguments is that with a large enough number of users (millions) an option can cause significant numbers of people grief if they misuse it. Same argument can be said for removing a feature 2% of the population of users rely on. 2% of 450 million users is 9 million users. Not what I'd call a tiny number of users.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
hysan 14y ago
Small number of people overall does not take into account where those users are concentrated. A lot of the options he uses as examples are extremely useful in third world countries where Firefox actually dominates the competition precisely because of how easy it is to configure it to be a low bandwidth browser. Africa probably being the best example of where Firefox dominates. So while it may be 2% overall, it could be something huge like 50% of the userbase in specific demographics/regions.
- chris_wot 14y ago
  2% of 450 million users is 9 million users.

krenel 14y ago

> For the love of god, what is wrong with having an Advanced options panel? The OP seems to think about the average user and decides that a lot of stuff is not needed in Firefox options. But the average user does NOT click on Advances Options in any case. To be fare, the average user do not click on Preferences at all. Is not bad idea to have some of this options as plugins, though. But we must remember that if the "average user" clicks on "Full screen" button (or even worse, F11), he/she'll probably have to reboot the computer in order to "fix" de computer.

XorNot 14y ago
The "average user" is also not a real user. There aren't actual average users - they're a conceptual aggregate of a broad-range of users who may use entirely different sets of features, which share only a few common overlaps. You can not damage the "average user" at all, but manage to break the workflow of most of your real users but eliminating parts of the set of features they depend on. i.e. remove 100 different features only used by 1% of your users, and it's actually quite likely you've removed features 100% of your users use.
- agwa 14y ago
  That's a really good way of putting it.
- Erwin 14y ago
  However the workflow issues you break are sometimes something like this: http://xkcd.com/1172/ http://xkcd.com/1172/ -- that may be a problem with software you paid $1 for 3 years ago and expected forever to work exactly as you need it.
  - nitrogen 14y ago
    Why shouldn't one expect to have one's purchased goods remain available indefinitely, no matter the price? This comic is not meant to be a justification for removing actual features.

singlow 14y ago

They don't need to remove the ability to override - they just need to remove it from the preference panel. As long as it is still available as a configuration change though an about:config screen or equivalent - admins in specialized environments can set it appropriately. In fact - they are more likely to set it through a registry setting or a domain policy and would never go to the preference panel at all.

tptacek 14y ago

I think you're dragging the article to a conclusion it didn't try to make. For the love of god, he didn't say that software can't have "Advanced" options panels. He pointed out a series of specific options that were either ill-advised, overly accessible, or so unusable as to be hardly better than a properties file. Firefox really does have an easily-reached config panel with "Use SSL 3.0" and "Use TLS 1.0" on it. What is the situation in which any user at your lab would know which of those options is sensible? Neither of them are the current version of TLS. Both of them have cryptographic flaws. And both are extremely widespread. Firefox really does have a top-level config panel with a checkbox that disables automatic image loading. It's not even an "advanced" option. I don't think your comment really engages with the article. What should the top-level options for a browser be?

Hello71 14y ago
Remove TLS version UI (Options > Advanced > Encryption > Protocols) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=733632 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=733632
agwa 14y ago
Several of the options (cache, TLS, certificate manager) he cited are already in the advanced panel and he wants to kill them. And in several places he explicitly says that these killed options (whether they're currently in the advanced panel or not) should be replaced by add-ons, not by an advanced option or even by about:config. So I don't think I dragged the article to a conclusion it didn't try to make. The article is clearly about killing options which I contend people need, and I think should be placed in an advanced section rather than killed.
- tptacek 14y ago
  He wants to kill those options. Not all the options. I don't think that was a good-faith response. Can you defend the SSL 3.0 and TLS 1.0 checkboxes?
  - arjie 14y ago

st3fan 14y ago

Oh you are one of the 5 people who use an NFS-based setup?

voidlogic 14y ago
Many computer lab like environments use NFS... While there may not be a lot of these, they can have hundreds of machines...
ZoFreX 14y ago
This was a problem at my university too, not a massive one though. Certainly an add-on could fix it rather than an option (really what would be ideal would be better group policy-style management of FireFox across workstations). In this instance I have to wonder if FireFox couldn't look for a quota - it can be detected.

JoshTriplett 14y ago

No, don't solicit spam for the bug that wants to remove the options; instead, go file a bug saying that Firefox should check the user's quota in addition to statfs. Easily added, and then Firefox becomes that much more automatic.

agwa 14y ago
> No, don't solicit spam for the bug that wants to remove the options It's not spam to discuss the merits of implementing a feature request. > instead, go file a bug saying that Firefox should check the user's quota in addition to statfs. Easily added, and then Firefox becomes that much more automatic. Not possible - the quota information is not made available in any standard way, but rather by a non-standard dot file in the user's home directory. I know the quota information should be exported by rquotad but things aren't always that neat in the real world. Even if it were possible users may still prefer not to sacrifice any of their quota-limited home directory to Firefox cache. Who's Mozilla to presume they know what users want?
- JoshTriplett 14y ago
  > It's not spam to discuss the merits of implementing a feature request. First of all, note that the tracking bug you linked to doesn't even track or discuss any bug about removing the cache options, making it pointless to bring up there. It wouldn't be spam for you file a bug requesting a fix for quota handling. It also wouldn't be spam for you to post a note to the bug about removing the cache options to point at the quota bug, and to make sure it'll stick around as an about:config option. However, canvassing for other people to go post to a bugzilla tracking bug just leads to noise like the current pile of comments in bug 851698; the vast majority of the comments in that bug, especially the ones by users labeled "(New to Bugzilla)", do indeed constitute spam, and those same comments show up in just about every bug trying to clean up the UI. See also https://www.xkcd.com/1172/ https://www.xkcd.com/1172/ . > Not possible - the quota information is not made available in any standard way, but rather by a non-standard dot file in the user's home directory. I know the quota information should be exported by rquotad but things aren't always that neat in the real world. So, we've started from "bug only seen by people running Firefox over NFS", already a very small fraction of users, and then shrunk the audience further to people who don't even use the standard quota mechanisms. An option to serve that vanishingly small fraction of users seems like precisely the domain of about:config. > Even if it were possible users may still prefer not to sacrifice any of their quota-limited home directory to Firefox cache. And those users can go tweak the setting in about:config, or you could tweak it for them by changing the system-wide default. That doesn't make it appropriate to put in the main configuration UI; not enough people use it, and its very existence in the UI hurts more people than it helps. > Who's Mozilla to presume they know what users want? Makers of a browser used by hundreds of millions of users, with extensive data from actual user testing, tons of statistical data telling them which settings and UI options people actually touch, and most importantly an understanding that just because an option has users doesn't mean it should continue to exist, and that the noisiest people on Bugzilla frequently don't represent a significant fraction of users. about:config exists to satisfy use cases like yours. Tone down the rhetoric and understand that when your software has hundreds of millions of users, every single change represents a tradeoff between who it might help and who it might hurt. This one seems far easier than most.

smnrchrds 14y ago

I think disabling cache could improve SSD lifespan. I would leave that option to the users.

adnam 14y ago

He said 'pretty likely' didn't he?

ianb 14y ago

Most prefs live on in about:config, and can be set in peers.js. This is probably easier to automate anyway.

hysan 14y ago

I made an account to try and leave a comment but seems like I don't have permission to do so. If you can, I'd be grateful if you left this comment for me: > Before moving forward with this suggestion, please do a usage analysis for each of these options (or any future suggested options) based on regions in the world. Several of these options (images - which doesn't break Google for me, javascript, cache) are all things that appear on the surface to be very useful in third world countries where bandwidth & hardware is very limited. The ease of finding and configuring these options might be precisely why Firefox has a healthy lead over competing browser in Africa. So while the overall percent of users is 2%, this number possibly shoots up to a majority of the user base when looking at specific regions or demographics. Specifically, image & javascript would help with bandwidth. Cache override/disable would be useful on devices like the Raspberry Pi that run off of flash media (or for use cases like running Firefox off a flash drive ala PortableApps); the type of hardware I would expect to be more widely used in 3rd world countries.

seanp2k2 14y ago

Also, because no one uses SSDs and those definitely don't have a limited number of writes. That said, they could make it smarter ("We see that you're using an SSD but you have some free space on this other disk. Should we use that for cache instead? Click here to read more about SSD write cycles...") or just cache in RAM only.

ygra 14y ago
Even with a page file on an SSD I haven't had a problem over years of operation. Granted, this is anecdotal, but wear levelling wouldn't exist if it made no discernable difference. Windows disables defragmenting on SSDs, but from what I gathered that's not so much because of write cycles but rather because it makes no performance difference and thus is time unnecessarily spent. That being said, making the algorithms smarter should probably help, e.g. only caching in memory if there is an SSD and just store frequently-used sites' resources on disk which might be a viable compromise.