This was mentioned by Kairo and others as something that would be nice to have so that certain prefs and pref panels can be hidden and that setting can be configured to match the IT literacy of the user.

This patch: * Adds a new integer pref "prefs.level" which at the moment understands 3 values: 0 - Basic 1 - Standard 2 - Extended * Adds two broadcasters to pref.xul: prefStandard - if elements observe this they only show when prefs.level = 1 or 2 prefExtended - if elements observe this they only show when prefs.level = 2 * Adds a new attribute for pref panels - preflevel if not set or = 0 preference is always shown if = 1 preference is shown for Standard or Extended if = 2 preference is shown for just Extended The observers and preflevel shown in the patch for preftree.xul and pref-appearance.xul are as example only - the decision on which level various prefs sit at has not been made yet. Still to be done: * Ability to hide an element without a prefstring set, for example groupbox

(In reply to comment #1) > 1 - Standard Please name that "Medium" or something like that, so we can still freely define what's our default without confussing anyone :)

Via IRC: (11:11:52) CTho: KaiRo: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=288764#c2 basic/intermediate/advanced ? (11:22:39) KaiRo: CTho: intermediate doesn't sound bad, yes...

I'm not all that fussed but I thought I'd just throw this into the ring. The names chosen are just what popped into my mind so I'm not fussed. They're just there to express the idea of what these settings wind up representing: Common Obscure Esoteric These kinds of names also have the advantage of not making a judgement call as to the users abilities. They merely reflect how likely a user is going to want to go through them and change them. As an example out of the air: a switch to change middlemouse.contentLoadURL would mostlikely go into Esoteric. It's not something most people would even think of or bother with but I find that I can't live without it and so having an easy way to deal with it is lovely. Please noone take this as a fanatical desire that things must be named like this. It's more of a thought starter on what to avoid (advanced and intermediate are not my favourites. advanced is more of a judgement call on the user and intermediate is kinda meaningless).

we should just remove UI for "obscure" and "esoteric" stuff.

Well as another example, smtpauth (from what I have seen) is pretty obscure. It rarely gets used. It's not advanced, intermediate or whatnot either (it simply is a setting that rarely gets used) and if you were to remove it from the UI it would be rather bad. It's not as easy as that. Hiding (obscuring ;) some prefs IS a good idea. Perhaps a 'Tune' or some other word would be a good idea. For example, the main screen would have the option for find-as-you-type but there'd be a button to tune it/config it to your tastes (I prefer to hit / beforehand and not get a noise). The name for this though has to be short, sweet, scream out 'more potentially useful stuff here' but it also needs to say 'if you don't want to bother with it, feel free not to'. IMO anyway :)

This very much a first pass of which prefs/panels/trees slot into which pref category - please make constructive suggestions for changes to this list. Basic should cover users who want to do some simple customisation of the suite but nothing too complex Intermediate should cover users who want to do more complex customisation of the suite and one-off changes needed for typical initial setup. Advanced should cover the indepth pref changes and development/debugging prefs.

I'm really sceptic that this will do something good. If you choose Basic as default one always has to prefix "please switch on intermediate or advanced mode and then go to Prefs->... to do..." while trying to help users in forums and usenet. While if Intermediate is default who would ever switch to Basic anyway? Most applications that tried this in the past have finally found other ways to deal with this now (like GNOME's Nautilus), shouldn't that tell us something? I think the goal should rather be to restructure the prefs panel and make some prefs easier to find (e.g. why the heck is animation mode under Privacy, why are Scripts & Plugins under Advanced and not under Privacy, I always look for them under the wrong main item).

This sounds to me like trying to be like Firefox, which is bad. This is SeaMonkey, where everything is visible. It's pretty easy to find everything, even for novice users, because most things are logically organized.

(In reply to comment #9) > It's pretty easy to find > everything, even for novice users, because most things are logically organized. > I strongly disagree. The organization is far from good. It took me forever to find the pref to automatically scale images and the pref to control whether toolbar buttons show text or just the icon. They're both on the root Appearance tab. I figured the first one was a Navigator thing (after all, what else shows me images?) and had no idea where the toolbar option would be. And why is "When SeaMonkey starts up, open <application>" an Appearance pref? That doesn't make much sense. I generally have a hard time finding prefs unless I alreay know where they are, and I like to think I'm a little better than a novice at this by now.

I agree with comment #8. What we really need instead is reorganizing the prefs. But I doubt that could be done for 1.1, though.

(In reply to comment #11) > I agree with comment #8. What we really need instead is reorganizing the prefs. > But I doubt that could be done for 1.1, though. > I also agree with both comment #11 and #8. SeaMonkey is for power users and people who already know the preference tree. If anything a reorganisation is needed. We should not obfuscate the advanced preferences. Just reorganise perhaps.

Ian, Are you still working on this ?

This will probably be re-evaluated once migration to new pref window has been completed.