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They really don't like preferences. I remember before Chrome's new preferences page it seemed to have many more options. I called them out on a few important ones disappearing and the answer was always "Not many people use those, and they confuse new users".

For a long while it was impossible to view TLS cert information on Chrome Mobile. One day they just disabled the UI for it. Too confusing for new users if they stumble in there.

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Same thing with Firefox. It's really frustrating. The options are incredibly sparse. I feel like there is a complete lack of creativity on the part of browser developers are to features that it'd be nice to have

At least Firefox has about:config, and everything can be changed there.

woah.. didn't know about that. It's a monster list of exposed internal variables? Talk about inaccessible...

MozillaZine has some documentation describing many of the about:config preferences:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/About:config

Any user who knows enough to know what he is doing on that page already knows about it.

Chrome has chrome:flags but it's not as useful (mostly about turning ON new experimental features than restoring established behaviour). And with both cases, you can't rely on it being there at the next mi or update..

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