Re: [Nautilus-list] Re: [Galeon-devel] native scrollbars (again)

[Abe Fettig <abe fettig net>]

On Wed, 2001-10-24 at 09:17, Tuomas Kuosmanen wrote:

> I agree galeon is nice. I like some of the features a lot, like tabs and
> the history and auto-bookmarks, but heck, not _everything_ needs to be
> configurable really. It should not take hours to set the preferences for
> you. 
> 
> One should rather make it behave like one expects it to work (user
> testing helps here) and to set most things right by default. Not
> everything needs an option in the preferences. I mean, it is cool that a
> tab changes color while the page is loading, but.. uhm.. nobody will die
> of frustration if you cannot customize the color. It is small things
> like this that creep in to the preferences dialog, and then it starts to
> resemble an adventure game :-)

As someone who jumps for joy every time a new option shows up in
Galeon's preferences, I just had to chime in here ;-).

Here is the situation as I see it: 

Some people (hackers, many/most current Linux users) really want to have
complete control over their desktop.  They want to be able to customize
everything.  This is why I and many others didn't start using Nautilus
until 1.03: until then there were just too many things about it that the
user couldn't control.

However, other people (office workers, artists, people for whom the
computer is a means to an end) are probably only going to be intimidated
by a complex preferences dialog.  For these people, having a intelligent
defaults and minimal config options is good.

Fortunately, you CAN have it both ways: just make "Show Advanced
Options" an option, or borrow the Beginner/Intermediate/Advanced setup
from Nautilus.  Actually, I believe that a while ago there was some talk
about making the Beginner/Intermediate/Advanced thing work across all
applications for Gnome 2.0, but I'm not sure what became of it.

In any case, this would be easy to do, and would (I think) make
everybody happy.

Abe