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

[Daniel Erat <dan_erat pobox com>]

On Wed, Oct 24, 2001 at 06:11:22PM +0300, Tuomas Kuosmanen wrote:
> On Wed, 2001-10-24 at 17:45, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
>     Make the program work; users don't care how it works. And that's
>     true for hackers as well. I know I don't care how my desktop
>     works, I just want it to do the right thing.
> 
> Amen :-)
> 
> Besides, do you really tweak the preferences back and forth all day?
> I usually configure a thing in a certain, sane way, and it then
> stays that way for ages. Meaning there really is no need for an
> option in the preferences, just a need for a sane default (or, like
> Havoc said, a brokenness that needs to be made to work right)
> 
> There is no need for a preferences setting you only change once.
> Also, if the app works in a sane way, although differently from what
> I am used to, it makes sense to adapt to the sane default behaviour
> than trying to bend the application around your own usage pattern.

I have to disagree.  Of course there's a need for a preference that you
only change once; the very fact that you changed it implies that it's
good that it was there.  The majority (I'm hesitant to say all) of the
preferences that are in Galeon are there because either a) users
requested them, or b) the developers couldn't agree on a default that
they all could live with.

There's been a lot of talk about Galeon having too many preferences, but
I haven't seen many examples of specific prefs that should be removed.
The Tab Colors colorpickers were mentioned, but what should the defaults
or alternate color-choosing behavior be?  (Remember, the text has to be
at least readable, and ideally not ugly, when used in conjunction with
every GTK theme that someone may be using.)

I'd be happy to go through the source and remove most of the prefs,
changing the code to just follow my settings, but I don't think that
would be a popular move. :)  Having choices is good, and I think that
most users will be much happier with too many prefs than with not
enough.  It's very frustrating when a program doesn't behave the way you
want it to, while providing no method for you to "correct" the behavior.

Daniel