6 ms·

> 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

• 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.
      • mfjordvald 14y ago
        How did you mentally go from "expected forever to work exactly as you need it." to "Why shouldn't one expect to have one's purchased goods remain available indefinitely"? There's a huge difference between being available and not ever changing. You're arguing against a point never made.
        • nitrogen 14y ago
          If I paid for a piece of software three years ago, I expect that piece of software that I obtained three years ago to work forever.
  • JoshTriplett 14y ago
    > 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. Perhaps true, but your estimates are off by many orders of magnitude. Wikipedia puts the Firefox userbase at 450 million. How many people do you think need to turn off SSL? Hundreds? Thousands? That's about 0.0002%. How many need to turn off or manually tweak the size of disk cache? Over 9000? That's still only 0.002%. And oddly enough, it'll overlap heavily with the last 0.002%, and the next 0.002%.
    • nitrogen 14y ago
      I think it's easy for early adopters to feel like developers owe us because we're the ones whose advocacy got them those 450mil users.
      • tomkarlo 14y ago
        Advocacy is fine, but in the end it was the product itself that got the 450M users. You can't grassroots something that's not actually good.
        • nitrogen 14y ago
          Right, the developers and the early adopters deserve deference; I'm saying that it's easy for an early adopter to believe that the other 450mil users do not. After all, they're using it anyway despite it being friendly to the early adopters.
        • singleuse 14y ago
          It doesn't mean the product was actually good, it simply means it lacked a better alternative.
          • deleted 14y ago
            [deleted]
          • tomkarlo 14y ago
• cfaubell 14y ago
  The number of times I've had to fix someone's "broken" browser because they accidentally pressed F11 is depressingly large.
  • hexagonc 14y ago
    The problem here is the lack of communication. How hard is it to show a brief popup telling the user what is happening and how to reverse it? At lot of applications with a fullscreen mode already do this. For example, Parallels and VMWare Workstation do it[1]. Options that can be confusing or dangerous should come with warnings instead of just taking them away. [1]I think there is a way to stop showing the message, though.
    • mkr-hn 14y ago
      Chrome does that when you hit F11.
      • vxNsr 14y ago
        in fact if you mouse to the top of the screen you can move away from full screen also
    • singleuse 14y ago
      Opera does it and offers an opera:config checkbox to turn the warning off. Firefox is one the few who does not offer this feature.