While I agree that some of these options need to be hidden away better, a lot of the complaints would be fixed by adding easy reset-to-default buttons, or even some marker to show when something is changed from the default.
If users go messing around in the important internals of the necessarily complex machine that is the browser then they deserve what problems they have. In short: If you don't understand an advanced option, stay the fuck away from it.
Also, the article suggests making certificate management an add-on, among other things. That is the stupidest and most insecure thing I've heard the past 2 years.
It's interesting that you think it's "the stupidest and most insecure thing you've heard in 2 years", because I think the certificate UX we have in modern browsers is the probably the worst security misfeature on the entire Internet, responsible for not just for the battle between end users and "self-signed certificate" warnings but for the fact that there are hundreds and hundreds of random CA=YES certs that could sign a Yahoo Mail domain cert.
Could you tell me more about how important the browser certificate UX we have now is worth defending, or even keeping? I think we should just jettison it completely and let extensions take over.
> If users go messing around in the important internals of the necessarily complex machine that is the browser then they deserve what problems they have. In short: If you don't understand an advanced option, stay the fuck away from it.
You've clearly never observed non-technical people using a new product. Telling users it's there fault doesn't generate revenue. Making your product idiot proof does.
>Telling users it's there fault doesn't generate revenue.
To be fair, there's only one browser right now that has "generate revenue" as a goal, and that's Chrome.
And I, for one, am tired of being hamstrung by "idiot proofing". What ever happened to "if something is important to you, DON'T fuck around with it if you don't know what you're doing!"
This is good life advice. What happens when you go mucking about in the internals of any sufficiently complex system without knowing what you're doing?
> To be fair, there's only one browser right now that has "generate revenue" as a goal, and that's Chrome.
Completely untrue. Let's put it another way - the only browser out there not to "generate revenue", is Firefox (and even then it does generate a tidy amount from search referrals).
Chrome - pushes Google services and ChromeOS.
Safari - Apple-only. Nuff said.
IE - the original bad-apple of browsers. Once it killed off it's competition (ie, web standards), team was disbanded.
back on topic, perhaps the best answer is to provide a reset button or when erroring, provide actual locations to fix your issue (ie, the SSL disabled issue).
Maybe you're in the business or have a moral mission of providing life lessons to customers. I'm in the business of helping them avoid life lessons by having stuff behave as expected.
And it's considered "stuff not behaving as expected" that when you clear a box that says "display images" that images are no longer displayed? (One of the examples from TFA)
If users go messing around in the important internals of the necessarily complex machine that is the browser then they deserve what problems they have. In short: If you don't understand an advanced option, stay the fuck away from it.
Also, the article suggests making certificate management an add-on, among other things. That is the stupidest and most insecure thing I've heard the past 2 years.