The debate between power and simplicity in software continues on. Should you make features that are scary, and only useful to a handful of your users?
My $.02: Let Firefox continue to be feature-packed. Why? The other (popular) browsers are lacking by default (default being without plugins) in this regard. Keeping Firefox feature-loaded out of the box reduces the hassle for somebody that needs access to powerful web tools, when the alternative is downloading a bunch of plugins/ extensions/ bloatstuff.
My $.02: Let Firefox continue to be feature-packed.
IMHO, this depends on the features.
For example, I don't know what they were thinking when they decided to introduce an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Adobe Reader, but I wish they hadn't. I frequently use on-line services that provide PDFs for various reasons, and after the first 48 hours I had to Google the settings to make Firefox just shut up and let Adobe Reader do its job, because too much functionality was badly presented or simply didn't work at all. Now I've just got all that extra code I'm never going to use bloating my browser.
If you're viewing content that's based on HTML and comes embedded in a web page, like images or HTML5 videos, sure, make the browser handle it. But you can download many kinds of data over the Internet, and the idea that a browser should become some sort of all-inclusive operating system/distro bundle that can interpret them all itself feels very unhealthy to me. What happened to using one tool for one job, and making each tool a specialist that does its job well?
I fully agree. Although some buttons might be hidden away a bit better, perhaps moved to about:config or have them trigger a warning, I love that Firefox has these features. I've used almost all of the mentioned features (including turning off images), so none of them are useless to me.
But 'Load images automatically' and Enable Javascript should not be those that are moved. I remember how a few years back I had to regularly uncheck the 'load images automatically' box just to get my slow like death internet load things that mattered. I'm sure there are many places in the world where people have to still deal with that regularly. Same goes with javascript - security, privacy for those who know how it might affect their normal browsing.
Disabling these on mobile is especially nice due to bandwidth costs and limitations. On Firefox for Android, images can be disabled by settings the permissions.default.image option to 2 in about:config. JavaScript can be toggled with the javascript.enabled option.
IIRC, Chrome for Android does not allow the user to disable image loading. Opera and Opera Mini do, and also allow the user to load images at lower quality. "Internet" (stock browser) does on my phone. Dolphin does.
My $.02: Let Firefox continue to be feature-packed. Why? The other (popular) browsers are lacking by default (default being without plugins) in this regard. Keeping Firefox feature-loaded out of the box reduces the hassle for somebody that needs access to powerful web tools, when the alternative is downloading a bunch of plugins/ extensions/ bloatstuff.