Spin-off from bug 187989 as requested. Firebird recently acquired an "Advanced" panel. This is bad UI for the following reasons : o it does not label the contents semantically (user does not know what's in there, and will end up searching it) o definitions of what "Advanced" means vary between users. Why is enabling auto-scrolling advanced ? Why am I an "advanced" user if I want to load tabs in the background ? o it humiliates the user ("you're too stupid to see what's in here"). This sounds like a frivolous point, but it is not. o Advanced panels historically tend to encourage "dump any and all prefs there without regards to design" A solution would require a re-working of the current categories in all likelihood, and some thought about future expansion. As the current plans seem to be to add lots and lots more prefs by default, there's little point attempting a redesign currently (but of course, this does not invalidate the bug itself)

Adjusting OS and Hardware. John, you have a good point here, but I think this can be tackled by 1.0 at the earliest, because the UI will be in a state of flux before that.

At least make the Advanced panel UI consistent with Privacy settings please. Everything is initially collapsed and expanded panel has yellow background (only one panel could be expanded at a time).

(In reply to comment #2) > At least make the Advanced panel UI consistent with Privacy settings please. > Everything is initially collapsed and expanded panel has yellow background (only > one panel could be expanded at a time). Yeah i noticed that too. I was on my way to file bugs [checking if it was reported already] when i saw your comment. Anyway, bug 247100 and bug 247102 have been created for this.

Yes, the yellow backgroud on Privacy but not Advanced is very annoying. One other problem with the advanced dialog is the grey backgrounds on the heading under Certificates and Validations (for instance, "Client Certificate Selection"). It doesn't need to be like that and looks quite ugly.

Another problem with the advanced panel is the fact Languages has been set in there. While languages may be an "advanced" option for people in the US or those that have a nicely configured localised build for the rest of the world this is a general option. There is in fact space for languages to move to the General tab. Personally I'd move the updates tab in advanced to it's own top-level-with-an-icon and shift security to privacy. (You have security because you *want* privacy).

comment #5 is just a symptom of the wider problem with having a tab called "Advanced" at all. Frankly, it's more like "Miscellaneous" pretending it isn't.

I'm searching for open bugs to work on and found this one. I've noticed that this modification request is quite old and has not been done. Moreover, the Firefox versions have changed a lot... So, I suggest to mark this bug as "CLOSED".

It's been almost a month since my last comment and nobody replied. This feature has changed a lot since 2003. The original report is very old and was probably for Firefox 1 or less. May someone close this bug please?

Old bug, this issue does not occur anymore on Firefox 9.0.1 at 2012.

The complaints from comment 0 still apply to our current preferences pane. We're going to be revisiting the preferences pane in bug 718011, though, so we can take those arguments into account. It's difficult to completely remove "Advanced" or other "grab bag" pref groupings, but it's worth trying.

Having several tabs in advanced is also making it hard to display search results as per bug 782599 While testing the search mechanism, I quickly moved all the content into a single pane like the other preference categories.

@Jack & Tina, This is a meta bug for the Advanced panel in the Preference page. Please take into consideration in your UX design, thanks.

Per meeting with UX, this bug will be taken into consideration in the Preference re-design project. So move under the bug 75271.9