<story><title>Checkboxes that kill your product</title><url>http://limi.net/checkboxes-that-kill</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>agwa</author><text>&amp;#62; 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.&lt;p&gt;No.  Here&apos;s a case where Firefox will definitely &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; 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 &lt;i&gt;everyone&lt;/i&gt;, which is enormous.  Firefox then attempts to use that space, and quickly exhausts the user&apos;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&apos;d rather use their space to store actual files.&lt;p&gt;For the love of god, what is wrong with having an Advanced options panel?  The author&apos;s stated goal is &quot;to design software that can be used by everyone &quot; 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.&lt;p&gt;The bug for this is &lt;a href=&quot;https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=851698&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=851698&lt;/a&gt; - 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.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tptacek</author><text>I think you&apos;re dragging the article to a conclusion it didn&apos;t try to make. For the love of god, he didn&apos;t say that software can&apos;t have &quot;Advanced&quot; 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.&lt;p&gt;Firefox really does have an easily-reached config panel with &quot;Use SSL 3.0&quot; and &quot;Use TLS 1.0&quot; 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.&lt;p&gt;Firefox really does have a top-level config panel with a checkbox that disables automatic image loading. It&apos;s not even an &quot;advanced&quot; option.&lt;p&gt;I don&apos;t think your comment really engages with the article. What &lt;i&gt;should&lt;/i&gt; the top-level options for a browser be?</text></comment>
<story><title>Checkboxes that kill your product</title><url>http://limi.net/checkboxes-that-kill</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>agwa</author><text>&amp;#62; 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.&lt;p&gt;No.  Here&apos;s a case where Firefox will definitely &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; 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 &lt;i&gt;everyone&lt;/i&gt;, which is enormous.  Firefox then attempts to use that space, and quickly exhausts the user&apos;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&apos;d rather use their space to store actual files.&lt;p&gt;For the love of god, what is wrong with having an Advanced options panel?  The author&apos;s stated goal is &quot;to design software that can be used by everyone &quot; 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.&lt;p&gt;The bug for this is &lt;a href=&quot;https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=851698&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=851698&lt;/a&gt; - 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.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JoshTriplett</author><text>No, don&apos;t solicit spam for the bug that wants to remove the options; instead, go file a bug saying that Firefox should check the user&apos;s quota in addition to statfs.  Easily added, and then Firefox becomes that much more automatic.</text></comment>