[72deluxe]

It's an interesting thought: should we be dumbing down everything or just engaging in a bit of education instead and helping people understand what JavaScript does and its use on web pages?

The manual for my car mentions things that must be done for maintenance. They don't dumb it down. Meanwhile in computer land we hide all options and dumb everything down to "protect" the user.

There is a difference between being easy to use and molly-coddling. It is a difficult balance to get it seems!

[quanticle]

>The manual for my car mentions things that must be done for maintenance.

Your car has a manual that describes maintenance. It doesn't have a button next to the radio that ejects the engine.

[masklinn]

> It's an interesting thought: should we be dumbing down everything

This is not a case of "dumbing down everything", the ability to remove javascript is still there, what is not there is one (of formerly 3) often inadvertently used method for it.

> The manual for my car mentions things that must be done for maintenance.

Disabling javascript is not maintenance, it's a significant structural change in the browser's abilities, like removing the car's suspension. And it makes no sense to put that as a switch on the car's dash.

[AndrewDucker]

Exactly. In order to do complex tasks you get out the manual, open the hood, and get to work.

And in order to do something equally complex in Mozilla you grab the help, open about:config and get to work.

Your car doesn't put complex details on the dashboard, and neither should Mozilla.

[pjc50]

If you want something used by millions of people, you have to make it as simple as possible. Insisting that people learn about the invisible internals is more likely to put them off using it than to result in them learning.

[varkson]

Who reads a car manual?

If you want to continue that, you could consider the manual to be about:config. No one is stopping you from reading the manual or going to about:config, but it's not required.