Removal of "Enable JavaScript" and "Load images automatically" in Firefox 23

[kla...@partyheld.de]

Folks, I have to express my strong objection to the removal of the
"Enable JavaScript" and also the "Load images automatically" settings
from the easily accessible "Configuration" dialog in Firefox 23. (And
yes, I do know that they are still present in "about:config".)


Reasons:
1) "Enable JavaScript": The much-quoted ( see e.g.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=873709 ) point of view at
http://limi.net/checkboxes-that-kill/ is a point of view of a web
developer, not a consumer. And not a very good web developer either -
the good ones will place a warning inside tag <noscript>, letting the
visitor know they need to enable JS for the site to work properly,
instead of letting their website fail silently/disgracefully.

The given reason to remove that setting has been to not let
"nontechnical" users disable JS based on an uninformed decision. In my
experience, though, the "nontechnical" users don't ever open the
"Configuration" dialog, let alone change anything there - they are
rightfully afraid of changes breaking their browsing experience. So, the
"Enable JavaScript" option was actually something for the "techie" users
using a quick way to disable JS, without the need to go to about:config
and having to remember the name of the affected parameter. (And possibly
having to search the web to make sure that "javascript.enabled" is
actually the one needed, or how about, e.g.,
"pref.advanced.javascript.disable_button.advanced" and friends? And
which one is it in the current version of Firefox, or the version I'm
currently using at a PC which is not mine?)

I do agree that the NoScript add-on is a better way for disabling JS,
and I am, in fact, its long-term happy user. (Including forcing HTTPS
for certain sites, its "Application Boundary Enforcer", etc.) But I only
use NoScript on my main Firefox profile, on my main non-administrator
Windows account. On the other hand, I keep the number of installed
Firefox add-ons on my Windows administrator account at zero, for
security reasons. And, for the same reasons, I also have JS disabled on
it most of the time, using the Firefox "Configuration" window.

Also, I sometimes use a Linux LiveCD which does not have the NoScript
add-on installed. And the Firefox "Configuration" window offers a quick
way to disable JS there, for security and privacy reasons. Instead of
having to waste time and RAM (that's where a LiveCD runs) for NoScript.

Unlike what some web developers claim, JavaScript is not needed for most
of the sites I visit. I don't need it for most of my web activities,
such as reading news and forums, looking up words in online dictionaries
(their forms work without JS), etc. And I don't even need JS for my
banking website ( https://banking.dkb.de/portal/portal/ ) - only their
auto-log-out countdown won't show - that's what I call "good"
developers. And if ever, very rarely, I come across a web site failing
entirely without JS, it usually warns me about it using the <noscript>
tag. (And they sometimes show the warning while still working good
enough for just reading them.) And a growing number of sites use HTML5
and CSS animation for many things anyway.

I understand website owners being upset about disabled JavaScript, as it
limits their ability to track and advertise, but I am the browser user,
not them. And forcing their point of view down "technical" users'
throats is not the way to go - it will just annoy them. And there are
quite a few of those with Firefox. While the "non-technical" ones are
not affected - they don't know what JS is or how it can be disabled in
the FF "Configuration" window in the first place.


2) "Load images automatically": There are remarkably few voices against
removing of this one from the "Configuration" window. I found its easy
disabling an advantage, too. I travel a lot, to different countries. And
don't always have WiFi nearby and then use the GSM tethering instead,
which often has speeds comparable to the good old modem dial-up. Having
been able to quickly disable image loading when on such connections
(sometimes along with JS), and then re-enable it again when on WiFi, has
been a great advantage. (Even my mobile browser offers that, also great
when on GSM.) It greatly limits load times and money spent on data
download. While, again, I don't need images to browse news, forums,
dictionaries, etc. They are "nice to have", but one can easily do
without for a while. (Although advertisers would disagree, I am sure.)

That, again, is a setting a "technical" user would use, while others
don't know it exists.

Now, with the setting only present in "about:config", I face the same
issues as with "javascript.enabled": which parameter is it (in the FF
version I use)? Do I have to remember that? For all browsers I use?


Oh wait, I just accidentally changed another "about:config" parameter,
which sounded similar, and forgot to re-set it back - so why does my
browser behave differently now while "syncing"? Is it a Firefox bug? I
think I need to report it in Bugzilla. (Just an example.)


-> There is a reason for that big fat warning when opening
"about:config" - it is not meant to be changed frequently. No matter how
"technical" one is.


So, please, bring both those settings back to the "Configuration" UI.
Their easy and safe access has been one of the advantages of Firefox.

Code/UI clean-ups are a generally a good thing, but this one went too
far. Configurability is a big advantage of Firefox. Also, it's a bit
hypocritical: the "technical" users are advised to use the "NoScript"
add-on (again, others don't know it exists), but each new version brings
additional "Developer Tools" (I'm not complaining, I like it, actually),
despite the also existing "Firebug" add-on.

And to close with an anecdote, referring to the "Google broken with
disabled images" argument in http://limi.net/checkboxes-that-kill/:
My completely "non-technical" sister asked me recently why I had
configured Google search as her home page, shown on browser start-up.
Her argument to change it (to her mail/news provider's page) was: "Why
do I need that Google search page - isn't that what that search bar in
the top right corner is for?"
So much to the "we just broke the internet" claim. And Firefox better be
fixed if disabled images prevent displaying of forms on it. Unless it's
Googles intention, as advertiser. (Unfortunately, I can't test that
claim now with FF 23, as don't know which "about:config" parameter
disables images loading :), but on Opera Mobile 12 the Google search
field is present with images disabled. And no need to go to
"opera:config" to do it there, by the way.)


Thank you!


P.S.: I sincerely hope that the other "killing" configurations mentioned
in http://limi.net/checkboxes-that-kill/ (concerning SSL/TLS, etc.)
won't be removed in future Firefox versions, or it would, indeed, have
"disastrous effects" on its users.

If someone is looking for meaningful improvements affecting all users:
How about the long overdue implementation TLS 1.1 and 1.2 (hopefully
configurable as now with TLS 1.0), and also "certificate pinning" as
done by the "Certificate Patrol" extension (
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/certificate-patrol/ )?
(Or "key pinning" as Chrome does it?) The latter would require some UI
design too, but would be a major improvement. As "techie", I like the
configurability of "Certificate Patrol" in its UI, not "about:config".
It can easily be made as unobtrusive or "panicy" as one likes, even if
it's just a once-and-for-ever configuration step.

For "non-techies", it seems that the Firefox "reset to default" button
is all they'll ever need. Maybe it should be moved out of its current
hiding somewhere easier findable by them, e.g. an own menu item under
"Help" (with an appropriate big fat warning)? (I personally have never
used it so far, but I might need to in future, if I manage to mess up
"about:config" parameters, deejaying the JS and image settings above in
future. So far, I have used "about:config" for some "once-and-for-ever"
configuration only, e.g. some security and privacy related hardening.)

Please don't take this as critic of any future UI changes. Normally, I
consider Firefox changes to be improvements - e.g. the new "selected
search engine applies to the whole browser" (i.e. also the address bar),
new development tools, etc. Neither will I complain about the missing
"blinking". (It's not in specs, with FF the only one having supported
it, and there are other specified ways to make things blink. But UI is
not covered by specs.) This is the first time I consider the change a
change for the worse. So much as to send my first e-mail to "firefox-dev".
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[Gavin Sharp]

Hi klasse,

Thanks for the feedback. I think most of your arguments rest on a
false premise: that the motivation behind this change was to
accommodate lazy or malicious web developers. As I mentioned in the
bug, the primary motivation was to simplify our preference pane to
remove options that are not relevant to the vast majority of our
users, and that produce a negative experience for the vast majority of
Web use cases.

It's great that you've been able to make use of NoScript and live
without JavaScript on the web, but I don't think your experience is
reflective of our user base in general.

Thankfully, given Firefox's strong add-on ecosystem and built-in
configurability (including about:config), the small set of users who
need to address these use cases can continue to do so.

Gavin

[kla...@partyheld.de]

Hi Gavin,

Actually, my arguments rest on the premise that the entire preference
pane is not relevant to the vast majority of your users. But I don't
want to give you any ideas here - please don't remove it. :)

Anyway, thank you very much for your professional response to my
grumbling. I appreciate it.

[Dão Gottwald]

On 08.08.2013 22:46, Gavin Sharp wrote:
> It's great that you've been able to make use of NoScript and live
> without JavaScript on the web, but I don't think your experience is
> reflective of our user base in general.

I think you're overusing this argument a bit. Users' experiences don't
need to be reflective of the general user base to be worth supporting --
at least not at Mozilla. For instance, accessibility is one of Mozilla's
key values even though lacking accessibility usually only affects
minorities.

It didn't and still doesn't make sense to me that we acknowledged that
there's a real and sensible use case for disabling images (slow
connections, data plans etc.), which may be essential to how some people
access the internet, but that this use case would be better supported by
a dedicated bandwidth saving mode, and that the option to disable images
could therefore go away -- without the hypothetical replacement being
available.

Dao

[Mike Ratcliffe]

Hi Klasse

I can feel your frustration here and completely understand it. There are
lots of reasons to test a site with JavaScript disabled... corporate
proxies, noscript fallbacks, disable animations etc. Because "Disable
JavaScript" is a developer option we have made it available in the
Developer Tools option panel. Once it is set then all sites loaded into
the current tab will be loaded with JavaScript disabled.

/Mike Ratcliffe

[Gavin Sharp]

On Fri, Aug 9, 2013 at 1:33 AM, Dão Gottwald <d...@design-noir.de> wrote:
> I think you're overusing this argument a bit. Users' experiences don't need
> to be reflective of the general user base to be worth supporting -- at least
> not at Mozilla. For instance, accessibility is one of Mozilla's key values
> even though lacking accessibility usually only affects minorities.

Sure, it's not only the size of the population making use of a feature
that needs to be taken into account, but also the feature's
criticality to that population (and also to some degree, the features
alignment with our values, as you suggest). I don't think image
blocking is as critical to users as our accessibility support, though.

> It didn't and still doesn't make sense to me that we acknowledged that
> there's a real and sensible use case for disabling images (slow connections,
> data plans etc.), which may be essential to how some people access the
> internet, but that this use case would be better supported by a dedicated
> bandwidth saving mode, and that the option to disable images could therefore
> go away -- without the hypothetical replacement being available.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/image-block/ seems like
a much better option for these users than the checkbox we used to have
in the preferences pane.

Gavin

[Dão Gottwald]

On 11.08.2013 01:06, Gavin Sharp wrote:
>> It didn't and still doesn't make sense to me that we acknowledged that
>> there's a real and sensible use case for disabling images (slow connections,
>> data plans etc.), which may be essential to how some people access the
>> internet, but that this use case would be better supported by a dedicated
>> bandwidth saving mode, and that the option to disable images could therefore
>> go away -- without the hypothetical replacement being available.
>
> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/image-block/ seems like
> a much better option for these users than the checkbox we used to have
> in the preferences pane.

This is helpful for users who regularly surf like this, although (1) I'm
not convinced these users should have to resort to an add-on and (2) it
seems somewhat schizophrenic to promote this add-on when it still
"breaks Google" (the reason why we removed the checkbox, as far as I
remember).

For users who unexpectedly have to deal with a borderline-unusably-slow
connection on the road (fwiw, this actually happened to me a few years
ago in an airport and my solution was to disable images), searching the
internet for an add-on is exactly what you don't want to do in such a
situation.

[C B]

I am curious about "breaks Google". I just turned off javascript and image loading (Firefox 22, I will not upgrade until the options are restored), and Google worked just fine. I briefly got a page that said "click here if you are not redirected" or something like that, but it quickly was replaced with the search results. Google is a very pleasant website to use because it has almost no graphics.

With images turned off the link to Google home page from the search results is invisible but it is still there and functional, and the link to click on to change your search is still there and still works but it is just a blue rectangle with nothing written in it, but I would not call either of those broken. Broken means they do not work, not that you can not see them.

 

--

Christopher Booth

[Dão Gottwald]

On 13.08.2013 21:34, C B wrote:
> I am curious about "breaks Google". I just turned off javascript and
> image loading (Firefox 22, I will not upgrade until the options are
> restored), and Google worked just fine.

From <http://limi.net/checkboxes-that-kill>:

"Here’s how Google’s front page looks like if you uncheck that box:
[...] That’s right, you can’t even see the text box you’re supposed to
type your search into. Congratulations, we just broke the Internet."

Of course you got the same result when disabling images in IE or Chrome
or via site preferences as Firefox still has them. And since both HTML
and CSS specs state that user agents may refuse to download images
(<http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/embedded-content-1.html#attr-img-src>,
<http://www.w3.org/TR/respimg-usecases/#user-control-over-sources>),
that was just a bug that should have been reported to Google. Indeed, I
just tested it, and it appears to be fixed on Google's end.

Dao

[Gavin Sharp]

On Tue, Aug 13, 2013 at 9:12 AM, Dão Gottwald <d...@design-noir.de> wrote:
> This is helpful for users who regularly surf like this, although (1) I'm not
> convinced these users should have to resort to an add-on and (2) it seems
> somewhat schizophrenic to promote this add-on when it still "breaks Google"
> (the reason why we removed the checkbox, as far as I remember).

1) is a pretty subjective argument, so I'm not sure we can
conclusively reach agreement. Re: 2), "It breaks Google" was not the
reason to remove the checkbox - it was just an example of how the
effects of the preference are not useful to the vast majority of
people browsing the Web. The reason we removed the checkbox was that
the preference was deemed not useful enough to merit a spot in the
preference pane.

> For users who unexpectedly have to deal with a borderline-unusably-slow
> connection on the road (fwiw, this actually happened to me a few years ago
> in an airport and my solution was to disable images), searching the internet
> for an add-on is exactly what you don't want to do in such a situation.

If we care to address this use case - I'm not sure that we do - there
are far more discoverable and useful options that we could implement
(low-bandwidth mode, etc.). Of course, I recognize that that's not
useful to the people who had gotten used to using this feature to
address this use case (poorly), but I assert that that loss is not so
great that it outweighs the benefits.

Gavin

[Dão Gottwald]

On 14.08.2013 19:28, Gavin Sharp wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 13, 2013 at 9:12 AM, Dão Gottwald <d...@design-noir.de> wrote:
>> This is helpful for users who regularly surf like this, although (1) I'm not
>> convinced these users should have to resort to an add-on and (2) it seems
>> somewhat schizophrenic to promote this add-on when it still "breaks Google"
>> (the reason why we removed the checkbox, as far as I remember).
>
> 1) is a pretty subjective argument, so I'm not sure we can
> conclusively reach agreement.

It's based on pretty simple ideas we should be able to agree upon:

- some users have to deal with connections that are limited enough that
our default behavior is barely workable

- enabling users to surf the web is a web browser's central objective

> Re: 2), "It breaks Google" was not the
> reason to remove the checkbox - it was just an example of how the
> effects of the preference are not useful to the vast majority of
> people browsing the Web. The reason we removed the checkbox was that
> the preference was deemed not useful enough to merit a spot in the
> preference pane.

That's not how I read http://limi.net/checkboxes-kill nor
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=851701#c0.

>> For users who unexpectedly have to deal with a borderline-unusably-slow
>> connection on the road (fwiw, this actually happened to me a few years ago
>> in an airport and my solution was to disable images), searching the internet
>> for an add-on is exactly what you don't want to do in such a situation.
>
> If we care to address this use case - I'm not sure that we do -

Why not?

Dao

[Dão Gottwald]

On 15.08.2013 11:12, Dão Gottwald wrote:
> On 14.08.2013 19:28, Gavin Sharp wrote:
>> Re: 2), "It breaks Google" was not the
>> reason to remove the checkbox - it was just an example of how the
>> effects of the preference are not useful to the vast majority of
>> people browsing the Web. The reason we removed the checkbox was that
>> the preference was deemed not useful enough to merit a spot in the
>> preference pane.
>
> That's not how I read http://limi.net/checkboxes-kill nor
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=851701#c0.

Re-reading that, the blog post (not the bug report) did go on to say
that the checkbox was probably only useful to less than 2% of people (an
argument that I countered elsewhere in this thread), but it started with
the assertion that it was harmful based on the fact that Google was broken.

[Gavin Sharp]

On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 2:12 AM, Dão Gottwald <d...@design-noir.de> wrote:
> It's based on pretty simple ideas we should be able to agree upon:
> - some users have to deal with connections that are limited enough that our
> default behavior is barely workable

I don't think this use case is common enough, and I don't think our
checkboxes are useful/discoverable enough to address it properly.
There are plenty of other edge use cases we could enumerate that we
don't currently address, and whose cases would be similar to the one
you make here. The only difference here is that this represents a
removal rather than a proposed addition. There should be a higher
burden for removing something than for not adding it, given the user
impact, but we can't have that burden be so high that we can never
remove things.

> That's not how I read http://limi.net/checkboxes-kill nor
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=851701#c0.

I'm telling you my reasoning for supporting the change, which might be
different than people's reasons for suggesting it.

Gavin

[C B]

Hi
Actually, all that the article checkboxes-kill does is identify some poorly written websites that are not very well written for user accessibility. I am not sure that Gavin is even aware of what the checkbox to not load images and javascript even look like. "people can end up checking it accidentally, which makes their browser be not useful". No, the check boxes are checked by default, which loads images, and allows javascript. They have to be unchecked to prevent images from loading and from allowing javascript. Perhaps that was just a case of not being careful with language, as was the choice to remove the options not being careful to respect users needs.

We do not uncheck the box to load images to make the browser unuseful, we uncheck it to do something useful for us, such as see what the alt tags are for the image, and to see what the website looks like for someone who does not have a browser that supports images, or is blind.

Yahoo has recently changed their e-mail UI to make it look more like gmail, and it has rendered it unusable to me unless I turn off javascript, which I did to send this e-mail. When you turn off javascript (you can try this for yourself with FF22 for example), it gives you a link to click on to be able to access a non-javascript website, which is what every developer should do who engages in stupid web tricks that use javascript.

I thoroughly agree with the comments that users are not idiots. If they do uncheck everything and want to repair everything, the standard procedure is to simply reload the browser, which will restore image loading and javascript.

--
Christopher Booth

--------------------------------------------
On Thu, 8/15/13, Gavin Sharp <ga...@gavinsharp.com> wrote:

Subject: Re: Removal of "Enable JavaScript" and "Load images automatically" in Firefox 23
To: "Dão Gottwald" <d...@design-noir.de>
Cc: "Firefox Dev" <firef...@mozilla.org>
Date: Thursday, August 15, 2013, 4:36 PM

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[Gavin Sharp]

I'm well aware of what the checkboxes do, and what they looked like.

No one said users are idiots; it's just important to know that they
often have things to worry about beyond taking the time to understand
your software's UI in great depth.

I don't think further discussion on this topic is likely to be
fruitful. I think your position is quite well understood, and we just
fundamentally disagree.

Gavin